Between Lives
by LeighaGreene
Summary: Takes place beginning after the end of HP7 (not epilogue compliant, slight AU) and runs through Sherlock 3.1 (Empty Hearse) so far. Series of shorts. Hermione is Sherlock's cousin. T for language. See preface for more background. Also, no real plot, just lurking around the edges of the original stories and fun might-have-beens. HG/FW/GW (off screen); no pairing for Sherlock
1. Preface

This is an unfinished series of shorts which was intended as a backstory for another thing I was kind of thinking about writing a while ago. It is NOT compliant with the epilogue to Harry Potter, and though it does follow along with BBC's Sherlock Series 1-3, much of it takes place before that series begins.

This is a crossover with Sherlock which takes its starting point in 2002 in an AU wherein Hermione spends… about three times as long as she should have in her third year. The temptation to catch up on all the background wizarding culture she never knew (and occasionally get a good night's sleep) was just too much. This has a cascade-effect on her life, though not too much on the general timeline, because Dumbledore never did understand the balance between controlling the flow of information and the advantages of informed allies. Hermione spent a lot of time with the Weasley Twins (who of course recognized all the signs of Time Turner abuse – Percy did manage _twelve_ OWLs and Prefect duties, after all).

By the summer of 1994, Hermione (and to a lesser extent, the twins) was (were) significantly OOC. She had a bit more perspective, less respect for the rules (and those who can't see that _yes_ it is sometimes necessary to break the rules in order to (attempt to) fix something larger, like a basilisk on the loose, or saving mythical alchemical artifacts from possessed defense instructors), and the twins have managed to interest her in their favorite subject: human nature. She, in turn, graced them with several very long lectures on responsibility and duty, and convinced them to turn their talents toward more serious endeavors (like altering and duplicating the Marauders' Map), rather than pranks which sadly often cross the line into bullying helpless younger students (and slightly less helpless older ones as well). She came to see Harry and Ron as (varyingly irritating) younger brothers, and developed a casual pseudo-relationship with the twins, which lasted until they dropped out halfway through her fifth year. She never _truly_ forgave them for leaving her alone with the idiots and _that toad_ , and still brings it up on occasion when they're having a fight.

Nonetheless, the Main Plot proceeded apace. An extra year's worth of reading and spell-practice (more or less), and eighteen months' added maturity is only a slight edge, in the long run, and all the major events still happen as ever they would have. In the spring of 1996, Sirius died. In the spring of 1997, Dumbledore died. In the fall of 1997, Hermione and Ron accompanied Harry on his hunt for horcruxes. Hermione spent a significant amount of time in 1997 cursing Dumbledore's name for never telling them _everything_. In 1998, the Battle of Hogwarts happens, Voldemort was finally destroyed, Snape, Remus, and Tonks died, and Ron died, instead of Fred, in the final battle. Harry ended up with Ginny, but he blames himself for not saving everyone, including Ron.

Hermione, who made the choice, in the heat of battle, to save Fred from a collapsing wall, just as Ron was struck down, blames herself even more. She couldn't bring herself to leave her education unfinished, so she took her NEWTs independently (she honestly could have left with the twins and still gotten all O's, even in fifth-year, but she couldn't leave Harry and Ron to fend for themselves against Umbridge.) and published several spells she invented in her sixth year and a breakthrough in privacy wards she invented while on the run as the Thesis for an Arithmancy Mastery over the summer of 1998.

She turns down every Ministry post offered (and a teaching position), eventually taking a job as an editor for Pressgap, a major textbook publishing company. After four years, when the publicity of being one of the remaining two members of the Golden Trio begins to die down, after Harry is well-settled into being a moody, brooding, co-dependent auror (instead of a moody, brooding, co-dependent teenager), and he and Ginny are (mostly) happily married, and most of the Death Eaters are finally captured (or assassinated, and if she had anything to do with any of that, she'll never say) she finally breaks down and admits that she's not happy living in Magical Britain. The only person she really wants to keep in touch with is Harry, and even then, most of their shared memories are very painful, making interactions between them infrequent at best.

Standard fanfic disclaimer: I have not made and will not make any money as a result of this story.


	2. 2001, Early Autumn

Harry was sprawled on Hermione's couch, very tipsy after celebrating the completion of his first successful capture as an Auror. Hermione was sitting on the floor, her back to him, leaning her head back, eyes closed. His words were washing over her, far more gently than they had any right to do, given the subject, though she supposed that was the alcohol. She was too drunk to care that he hadn't taken his shoes off on her sofa, which was far more drunk than she could ever remember being before, even at his wedding.

"Ron should be here. We were going to be partners, you know, after the war. We had it all planned out. Well, kind of. He always had a crush on you, you know. That part would never have worked. But being aurors together, that would have. Back… back before everything… you, did you ever think you would end up here?"

It took a long moment to register that Harry had said something requiring an answer.

"What'ssat?"

"Did you think you'd be, you know, living alone and correcting books for a living and hiding from reporters and shit all the time?"

"Mos' th' r'porters are gone now."

"You know what I mean, 'ermione."

Hermione made an effort toward coherency. "Yeah, s'pose I do. And no. If I'm t'be honest, I dunno if I thought we'd live. I definitely thought you'd die, and I… I couldn' imagine I'd not have died before you. I mean, I was needed, right? Until the last… never woulda made it alone… but I though' Bitchy Bella'd take me out or something before the end."

There was a shifting sound that could have been a nod from the couch behind her. She looked up to see Harry's green, green eyes looking at her intently. "Are you happy, now?" he asked, "With, y'know, everything? Life, and stuff?"

Hermione sighed. That was the question, wasn't it? And if she was honest with herself, she'd already been thinking it. It just took a lot of firewhisky to bring her to say it: "No." She didn't elaborate, and Harry didn't ask her to. She took another drink from the bottle they'd been passing between them, and looked back to see that the Savior of the Wizarding World had fallen asleep on her.

She smiled fondly at him and pulled herself upright, clumsily laying a blanket over the man before retiring to her bed. No, she wasn't happy, and perhaps, now that she had admitted it out loud, she could change that.


	3. 2002, May

Hermione had wasted no time, once she finally admitted to herself that she was unhappy in Magical Britain. The only person she really cared to talk to, anymore, was Harry, and even then, they did not get together often – It seemed that whenever they were together, the conversation inevitably turned to Ron, or the War, or some other unpleasant subject (she didn't know how Harry and Ginny could stand it [actually, that was a lie: she knew that Harry really didn't handle it well, but Ginny loved the fact that Harry needed her to be his emotional crutch. They were _painfully_ co-dependent.]). She still saw the Weasleys occasionally, of course. She and Andromeda and Teddy were always invited to Weasley family holidays, since Teddy was Harry's godson, and Andromeda was his guardian, and none of them had anywhere better to be, but even Ginny and the twins had learned to give her space, over the past four years, and they had not grown close again. Their history was too deep to for distance, and too painful for closeness.

So when she finally admitted to herself that she was unhappy, she considered the job offers she had turned down at the end of the war. Almost every department at the Ministry had offered her a position. The exception, of course, was the only department she would have actually considered: Mysteries. They had blacklisted her after the events of the 1993-1994 school year – though they were more concerned for her refusal to comply with their secrecy protocols than her overuse of the Time Turner itself. She reconsidered returning to Hogwarts as a teacher, or doing something else in publishing, and even Fred and George's open offer to come and develop new products with them. None of the offers was any more appealing than it had been in 1998, even if the positions were still available. Her post-war celebrity finally seemed to be dying down after all.

After two weeks, she realized that she needed to get away from Magical Britain entirely. The extra work she had done (on a completely unofficial and freelance basis) to ensure that rogue Death Eaters were rounded up (or just disappeared) throughout Europe was completed (though she would wait, as planned, to retrieve her parents in 2007. One really couldn't be _too_ careful, after all). Her editorial position with Pressgap was a dead-end, unless she wanted to wait around another hundred years for the owners to die and take it over. She hardly knew anyone personally, and couldn't really meet anyone, given the way people still talked about her, even if she was no longer constantly in the papers. There was really nothing left for her in Magical Britain, except Harry, and he would owl her anywhere, so he hardly counted.

So, then, she decided, she would just have to go back to the muggle world. Perhaps she would get a proper university degree. There were, at the very least, more career options in the muggle world, and she could be relatively certain that most people _wouldn't_ already know her name when she introduced herself.

That was the hardest part, really. From there, it was difficult, but not impossible – muggleborns hardly ever attempted to return to the muggle world once they had been gone for a while. Generally, if they went back, it was just when they graduated from Hogwarts, and the school arranged to falsify qualification exam scores so that they could just get a job. Hermione, in contrast, would not settle. She wanted the proper background information so that she could enter any decent university and pursue… some program of study. She was, of course, a bit old to be entering Uni, but then, she expected there would always be some students looking to change careers.

She spent six months studying feverishly for her A-Levels, putting in arguably more work than she had for her OWLs and NEWTs combined, as she had been ridiculously advanced over her peers back then, rather than playing catch-up on entire subjects. She travelled to London to sit the exams independently and research what other documentation would be required for her entry into a university program. After several judicious uses of memory charms and a few simple forgeries (she couldn't very well turn in a letter of recommendation from the Headmistress of Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, though she was sure Professor McGonagall would be happy to write one), she was properly enrolled at King's College. She wrote several letters, and then made a few calls to her uncle, and then one of her cousins on her mother's side of the family to sort out a living space. She resigned her editorial position, and corrected the last proofs she would ever have to deal with. On the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts, she made the announcement to Harry and the assembled Weasleys: she would be moving to the muggle world on the first of July, to return to school in the fall.

There was, as expected, an uproar. The only person who seemed to support her choice to go back was Harry. Hermione shrugged internally as she fended off red-headed objectors. It was, as she had carefully calculated, far too late to change her plans now. She was gratified by Harry's congratulations and the twins' stunned incomprehension (as they strongly believed that speechless awe was the highest form of flattery), and left the celebration early to continue packing.


	4. 2002, First of July

Hermione knocked tentatively on the door of the flat to which her cousin had kindly directed her. There was no response. She knocked again, somewhat more forcefully. When there was still no answer, she used the key that had been provided to let herself in.

The front room was a shambles. It looked rather as though a bomb had gone off. The closest she had seen was the common room after Gryffindor won the Quidditch Cup in her first year. It was obviously lived in, and didn't look like anyone had tidied in _months_ , at _least_. There were dirty mugs and half-empty takeout dishes on at least half the horizontal surfaces, teetering piles of newspapers, magazines and maps, a wall covered in clipped articles, and a human skull on the coffee table, surrounded by tiny piles of what, on closer inspection, appeared to be about fifty different types of cigarette ash. The skull, on closer inspection, was real, and had clearly been lifted from a laboratory's mounted specimen. She wondered why anyone should steal such a thing. It wasn't as though a loose skull was a particularly useful object.

There was a desk in the corner, buried under a slew of hand-written pages and cut-up newspapers. The bookshelves were filled largely with forensic non-fiction: everything from forgery analysis to fingerprinting techniques to interrogation manuals to anatomy and chemistry texts, while even more such literature had migrated to join the coffee mugs on every available surface. She found an overturned box of what appeared to be loose crime-scene photos in a corner, and the rather large dining room table was taken up with a number of… experiments, she supposed she could call them, though the notes scribbled on various scraps of paper nearby did not precisely scream 'scientific rigor' to Hermione. A violin lay abandoned on the sofa, and the remains of an overturned tea-tray had been half swept under the lone armchair.

"Hello?" she called out as she made her way carefully through the chaos. She spotted a hallway with three doors leading off of it, but decided to explore whether the kitchen was quite as much a disaster as the living area before she checked to make certain that her cousin hadn't died in his bedroom.

As it turned out, he had not, for on the floor of the kitchen (which wasn't quite so overwhelmingly untidy as the living space, though not, apparently for lack of trying), lay the single most-strung-out looking person she had had the misfortune to see since Sirius Black had turned up at the Shrieking Shack in 1994. He actually looked a bit like post-Azkaban Sirius, with his dark, unkempt, greasy curls, high-cheekbones and emaciated frame. She knew he was in his late twenties, though he looked a bit older from his gaunt features.

"Sherlock Holmes?" she asked loudly. The man did not respond. She could see he was breathing. "Oy! Cousin!" Nothing.

So she did what any sensible girl would have done: she filled the nearest coffee cup with water and flung it in his face, from a safe distance of course. He came to with a start, and she was glad of the distance, as she was only just fast enough to avoid the little glass bottle he hurled at her before he even focused on her face.

"Sherlock Holmes, I presume?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at her estranged cousin.

He gave her a long, assessing look before he said, in an utterly disgusted tone, "Tell Mycroft to shove off and let me go back to sleep." And he lay back down on the floor as though this was the most normal thing in the world.

"Sorry?"

"I don't know you," he said without opening his eyes. "White, female, twenty-four, perhaps twenty-five years old; middle to upper middle class, parents probably doctors – no dentists, perfect teeth; originally from somewhere… southeast of here, Maidstone, perhaps, but recently returned from several years, possibly up to a decade living in Scotland; educated, well-mannered, and smart enough to wake me from a distance; you stand as though you believe you have some right to be here, and you seem just slightly too buttoned-down to know how to b&e, so most likely the landlord or my brother gave you a key. Rent's paid up, so it wasn't the landlord. Fact that you woke me despite your obvious manners suggests that you are here on some sort of mission, qed, Mycroft has sent another of his minions to try to convince me to return to the fold and play the good little boy for mummy and father, or whatever it is he's on about. Feel free not to tell me."

Hermione couldn't help but giggle at his indignant tone. "Close, but not quite."

Sherlock sat up again, glaring at her more closely. She righted a chair and took a seat, uninvited. "Mycroft did give me the key, but I'm not a minion. I'm your cousin, Hermione Granger." Sherlock's eyes narrowed.

"Prove it."

Hermione hesitated, but complied. The habits of war are hard to break. "Well, I don't know that I can. I mean, documents can be faked, you know, and we don't share any secrets. But the first and only time we met was twenty years ago. I was three, and you were far too old to be wearing that sailor suit Aunt Patty had forced you into. You refused to be introduced as William, which is your middle name, I suppose? And declared yourself a pirate, and spent the entire day sitting in a tree. My mother and your father had a stupendous row, about what I haven't the foggiest idea, and we never visited again."

"Why are you here?" Sherlock asked, only slightly less suspicious.

"Oh, come off it, have you been high all week?" Sherlock's expression changed slightly, suggesting not. "What, then? Do you mean to imply that Mycroft _didn't_ tell you he'd told me I could stay here for a bit whilst I figure out something else in the City?" An angry flare of his nostrils indicated that this was the case. "I don't believe that man. Where's your telephone? Ah, nevermind," she said, spotting it and dialing the number Mycroft had given her. Sherlock gave her an incomprehensible look, and laid back down again, apparently deciding to wait until Mycroft had explained himself to ask or answer any more questions or show off more parlor tricks.

She added, while she was waiting for the call to ring through, "And it's closer to fifteen years in Scotland, and I resent the fact that you think I'm too straightlaced to break into your grubby flat. I'll have you know I – Mycroft? Mycroft Holmes! This is your cousin Hermione, speaking. – Yes. Yes. Did you or did you not actually ask your brother if I could stay with him? I _see_. Well, I don't rightly see that it matters _who_ pays the rent. It's a matter of common courtesy, isn't it? I mean, the very least you could have done was give the poor man some warning. No. No. Yes, that's exactly what I mean… You didn't say you wanted me to _babysit_! He's got to be at least three years older than I am! So what? So he's a grown man! He doesn't need me or you or anyone else checking up on him! Yes, of course, he was passed out on the kitchen floor when I got here… Well that's his choice, isn't it? No, that won't be necessary. We'll work it out between ourselves. No. Thank you, but you've done quite enough. No. Good _bye_ , Mycroft!"

"Well," Hermione said to her apparently-sleeping cousin, "That could have gone better."

"Oh, no, I'd say you actually came out ahead in that one. How long are you staying?" her cousin asked, still lying on the floor, eyes closed. Apparently he had either decided to trust her, or that he didn't mind having her around if she would yell at Mycroft for him.

"Mycroft said I can stay as long as I like, so I suppose until I get fed up enough with your mess to leave, or you decide I'm irritating enough to poison."

"Your bedroom's the one that's empty," Sherlock said, waving vaguely in the direction of the hall.

Hermione noted that he hadn't denied that he would consider poisoning her, but smiled anyway and went to have a closer look around her new rooms. She supposed she'd get settled in, and worry about tidying the living area and the kitchen, and perhaps forcing her mad cousin to eat something later.

…

Sherlock Holmes was quite rudely awakened by approximately six to eight ounces of water hitting him in the face, and a low, female voice saying, "Sherlock Holmes, I presume?"

She was approximately five foot six, with long, curly brown hair braided back out of her face, brown eyes, and a thin frame, perhaps 110 or 115 pounds, but healthy-looking enough. Perhaps she was as young as twenty-two, but from the lines around her eyes and forehead, he would say slightly older, or else had spent many years under enormous stress. Twenty-four or twenty-five. Fit, since she managed to dodge the morphine vial, and the way she moved and held herself suggested a fighter, not one of those ridiculous girls who only goes to the gym to lose weight. There was something about her _presume_ that suggested time spent in the north, though she was obviously from the south to begin with. She wore slacks with sensible shoes and a maroon jumper over a white collared shirt. She had scrubbed the ink-stains from her hands and painted her nails to cover any staining, probably, since the shade matched her jumper but she wasn't wearing any other makeup and her hair was just barely contained. So, an office job, something high ranking, if they still used fountain-pens regularly, but with some kind of combat training. Add to that she was standing in his kitchen as though she had every right to be there, and she had obviously been sent by Mycroft.

"Tell Mycroft to shove off and let me go back to sleep." There, proof he was not dead, and still in his right mind, more or less. Perhaps she would go away.

"Sorry?" …Or perhaps not. Stupid girl.

"I don't know you," he explained, and began rattling off enough about herself to hopefully unnerve her and get her to leave. "White, female, twenty-four, perhaps twenty-five years old; middle to upper middle class, parents probably doctors – no dentists, perfect teeth; originally from somewhere… southeast of here, Maidstone, perhaps, but recently returned from several years, possibly up to a decade living in Scotland; educated, well-mannered, and smart enough to wake me from a distance; you stand as though you believe you have some right to be here, and you seem just slightly too buttoned-down to know how to b&e, so most likely the landlord or my brother gave you a key. Rent's paid up, so it wasn't the landlord. Fact that you woke me despite your obvious manners suggests that you are here on some sort of mission, qed, Mycroft has sent another of his minions to try to convince me to return to the fold and play the good little boy for mummy and father, or whatever it is he's on about. Feel free not to tell me."

She _giggled._ He supposed that's what he got for being nice and not talking about her obvious lack of field experience and the likelihood that the wariness to approach him to wake him was due to a bad experience on one of her few field missions before being reassigned to her desk-job. "Close, but not quite." _What_?

He sat up again, scrutinizing her more closely. No, all the signs were consistent, and he was certain his interpretation was the most likely explanation. She righted a chair and took a seat, uninvited. "Mycroft did give me the key, but I'm not a minion. I'm your cousin, Hermione Granger." Sherlock's eyes narrowed. He _did_ have a younger, female cousin, he recalled, but no one in his family had mentioned Emma Granger in at least twenty years.

"Prove it."

His supposed cousin hesitated, and he wondered why. "Well, I don't know that I can. I mean, documents can be faked, you know, and we don't share any secrets." Ah, that explained the hesitation, but her willingness to respond to a security-question protocol and her quick understanding of its weaknesses suggested that she was, in fact, one of Mycroft's. "But the first and only time we met was twenty years ago," she continued. "I was three," highly unlikely, given her current apparent age, "and you were far too old to be wearing that sailor suit Aunt Patty had forced you into. You refused to be introduced as William, which is your middle name, I suppose? And declared yourself a pirate, and spent the entire day sitting in a tree. My mother and your father had a stupendous row, about what I haven't the foggiest idea, and we never visited again." All true, aside from the fact that William was his first name, but Mycroft could easily have supplied those details. He decided to act as though he possibly believed her.

"Why are you here?" He asked, in a slightly less suspicious tone.

"Oh, come off it, have you been high all week?" He most certainly had not. He had finished with a case not three days ago, and waited until the monotony of life had settled back in before turning to the morphine. "What, then? Do you mean to imply that Mycroft _didn't_ tell you he'd told me I could stay here for a bit whilst I figure out something else in the City?" He had _not_. Well, he might have tried, but Sherlock supremely doubted he had even bothered to call. He knew Sherlock wouldn't answer. "I don't believe that man. Where's your telephone?" the girl said, even as she looked around the room. "Ah, nevermind." She spotted it on the floor under the window and dialed the familiar tones of Mycroft's office. Well, he would give her this: This was the most pleasant conversation he'd had with any of Mycroft's agents in well over a year. At least she seemed to have _some_ ability to read people and interpret his responses accurately, even if she did talk altogether too much. He laid back down again, content to eavesdrop from a supine position.

She continued to talk while she was waiting for the call to ring through: "And it's closer to fifteen years in Scotland ( _boarding school then, with mostly British teachers_ ), and I resent the fact that you think I'm too straightlaced to break into your grubby flat ( _hmmm… perhaps she wasn't one of Mycroft's then… or else she had been criticized in the past for failure to think outside the box_ ). I'll have you know I – Mycroft? Mycroft Holmes! ( _Damn Mycroft's timing. That sentence had the potential to actually have been interesting_.)

Sherlock amused himself by filling in his brother's half of the conversation based on her responses. "This is your cousin Hermione, speaking. – Yes. ( _Ah, hello, Agent X. Did you find the flat alright?_ ) Yes. ( _He's still alive?_ ) Did you or did you not actually ask your brother if I could stay with him? ( _How is the setup proceeding?_ ) I _see_. Well, I don't rightly see that it matters _who_ pays the rent.  ( _It is none of Sherlock's business who I allow to stay in the flat: I pay the rent. He has no power to throw you out_.) It's a matter of common courtesy, isn't it? I mean, the very least you could have done was give the poor man some warning. No.  ( _Does he look to be believing this play?_ ) No. ( _*Loud sigh audible to Sherlock on the floor through the line*_ ) Yes, that's exactly what I mean… ( _I suppose we must continue with this farce?_ ) You didn't say you wanted me to _babysit_! ( _Very well, then. Sherlock is simply not responsible enough to mind his own rent or make any decisions regarding his own life. You are there to look out for him_.) He's got to be at least three years older than I am! ( _So? What difference does that make?_ ) So what? So he's a grown man! He doesn't need me or you or anyone else checking up on him! ( _You have seen him, yes? Spoken with him?_ ) Yes, of course, he was passed out on the kitchen floor when I got here… Well that's his choice, isn't it? ( _If I don't send people after him, I worry he will overdose and die in his sleep_.) No, that won't be necessary. ( _Do you require backup?_ ) We'll work it out between ourselves. No. Thank you, but you've done quite enough. ( _Well, then, ring off in a huff and be done with it._ ) No. Good _bye_ , Mycroft! ( _If that is all, I really must be getting on with things. Good luck, Agent X_.)"

"Well," his supposed cousin said, settling the phone back into its cradle suspiciously gently for such an "angry" dismissal of his brother, "That could have gone better."

 _Fine, let's play the game._ "Oh, no, I'd say you actually came out ahead in that one." Seriously, he doubted Mycroft's minions were allowed to _call_ him Mycroft very often. It would be a mark of notoriety among her fellow minions. "How long are you staying?" he asked, still lying on the floor, eyes closed. It wasn't as though he could exactly call the bobbies to throw her out, after all. He would just have to drive her away, or perhaps poison her if she was too persistent. Non-fatally, of course, if she proved to be as intelligent as she seemed so far.

"Mycroft said I can stay as long as I like, so I suppose until I get fed up enough with your mess to leave, or you decide I'm irritating enough to poison. By the way, your arsenic experiment's gone off." Good, they were on the same page. Perhaps he would actually be able to hold a decent conversation with this one. And she had obviously been nosing around for a while before she woke him if she had found his notes on the arsenic experiment. He'd abandoned it nearly a week ago, when the case arrived. He should re-start it… perhaps after coffee. And more sleep. He couldn't have been out for more than an hour, and he'd been up for at least two days before that.

"Your bedroom's the one that's empty," he said. It wasn't as though it mattered. She would doubtless poke her nose into everything, anyway, if she hadn't already. She walked out without another word, and did not wake again until she dropped a piece of toast on his face about five hours later, judging by the shadows on the floor. He flinched into alertness, and then ignored the offending bread-item for several minutes, hoping it would go away. It did not, and so he eventually sat up again.

"Food," he informed his supposed cousin, "Is revolting."

She was sitting at the table, reading what appeared to be his favorite text on biochemistry and drinking tea. "Hmmm… an unfortunate but necessary requirement of the animal body," she noted, turning a page.

But Sherlock was no longer paying attention, because he had realized that the girl was sitting _at his table_. "What the bloody hell have you done with my experiments?" he staggered to his feet. And then he noticed that the entire kitchen had been tidied. Clean coffee mugs had been stacked in a pyramid to dry, and all of the counters were clear, and the overflowing rubbish bin had been taken out. There was a kettle on the range, and a cup of tea sitting near where his head had been, still warm.

"I've disposed of the ones that had gone off," she said, not looking up from the book, "and moved the ones that could be salvaged to the coffee table."

"What have you done with my ashes?" he asked in horror. It had taken him _weeks_ to acquire all those different brands.

She pointed at a small basket filled with hand-folded envelopes of what appeared to be some kind of heavy specialty parchment. He picked one up to see that it was sealed with a tiny daub of wax, and labeled with a number corresponding to a diagram of the coffee table, indicating its previous position in relation to all the others. "Assuming you even knew which pile was which to begin with, you ought to be able to sort it out," she said, turning another page.

Sherlock tore his gaze away from the little envelope of ashes to look around at the rest of the room, and gave a tiny involuntary scream of panic. Everything had been moved. He wouldn't be able to find _anything_. His _desk_ had been _organized_ , and all the books were on the shelves, which was _impossible_ , since he knew he had more books than shelf-space, and his skull was on his desk and the couch was covered in neat stacks of papers and folders labeled in the same flowing hand as the ashes and the diagram in his hand. She had retrieved all of his chairs from their various resting-places, and there was a _plant_ in the _window._ And there were curtains! And _carpets_. He made an incoherent stuttering noise, and the horrid girl finally looked up.

"If you're not going to eat, you really ought to drink your tea. I mean, judging by the look of you, it's probably only been about, what, two days, since you've eaten? Three? But your liver and kidneys need water to process whatever drugs you've been taking, and – oh for the love of light, sit down before you fall down. It's all sensibly organized. You're supposed to be rather intelligent, aren't you? You'll figure it out in no time at all."

"You have to leave," Sherlock said abruptly.

"Beg pardon?"

"This isn't going to work. Not at all. You need to go."

"I most certainly do _not_ need to go. I've only just got your mess sorted. And anyway, if you could have had me thrown out, you would have done the first time I woke you."

They engaged in a staring contest for several tense, silent minutes, Sherlock's fury matched equally by Hermione's placid determination. When, after several minutes, Sherlock continued to say nothing, Hermione broke the silence. "Let's talk about these," she said, pointing at a small collection of vials, powders, and syringes she had accumulated at the foot of the table. At a glance, it looked like everything he had cached around the flat.

Sherlock returned to the kitchen, fetched his teacup from the floor, then took the seat she had indicated. Perhaps, if he was compliant, there would be some way to get out of this without being arrested, or worse, without her telling Mycroft.

"What do you want from me?" he asked, hiding his anger well, he thought.

She smiled. Either she was genuinely pleased, or a very good actress. "Well, my classes start in two months, so I'll often be out of the flat after that, unless I find something better first, of course, but until then, I suppose I just want you to let me be and don't get caught doing anything that might bring the Yard barging in, like dying or getting arrested while high. I'm not really sure why you think I'm here, but Mycroft seems to think I'm going to babysit you, and that's simply not the case." Ha! "As I told him on the phone, you're a grown man. It's none of my business how you starve or poison yourself, provided you don't actually frame me for your murder." That _was_ a possibility. If Mycroft thought him dead, he might stop sending minders after him…

"Let's see… other ground rules… Stay out of my room and I'll stay out of yours. I'll clean when the mess bothers me, since it's obvious you haven't the slightest inclination. If you want me to save your experiments, you need to take proper notes so I know what to leave and what's rubbish." Sherlock was somewhat offended by this. His notes were perfectly adequate! "I keep terrible, irregular hours, though I don't suppose you'll mind. I mostly keep to myself. I, unlike you, do eat, and therefore cook, so I'll be keeping food in the ice box. You're welcome to help yourself to anything if you suddenly decide you're _not_ anorexic. Kindly restrict your experiments to the lower shelves, and leave the upper ones for food. I'd rather not have biological substances unknown dripping into my jam, thank you very much." She… didn't mind the experiments in the fridge? Well, maybe he could work with this one after all. "Oh, and I'm borrowing your library. That's non-negotiable." Obviously, since she was already reading one of his books. "Do you have anything to add?"

"I'm not anorexic. Eating slows the mental processes. And my notes are perfectly adequate for my purposes."

"You told me food was revolting, despite the fact that you clearly haven't eaten in at least two days, which screams anorexic in my book. Unashamed anorexic, but nonetheless." She slid a paper across the table at him. "Those aren't coherent. I don't even think they're all related to the same experiment. And while you may be right about the effects of eating large, heavy portions, I regret to inform you that things start getting a bit muddled somewhere around the twenty-four hour mark without some form of caloric intake, and then you only _think_ you're thinking clearly."

He sneered at her. Perhaps that was true for normal people. He, however, had trained himself over long years to ignore such 'requirements' of his body. "I suppose you would know." He ignored the notes. He preferred not to admit that he could not recall exactly to what they pertained.

She shrugged. "I suppose _you_ think I'm saying this as some spoiled office worker who's never done a real day's work nor wanted for anything in her life. You don't know nearly as much about me as you think you do, Sherlock. I spent eleven months on the run about four years ago. Food was scarce. We were lucky if we ate every other day. So yes, I _would_ know. Besides, the brain is the most energetically expensive organ in the body. You can run and fight when you haven't eaten in five days, even a week: adrenaline will see you through. But any plans you come up with at that point are pretty well guaranteed to be worthless." _Interesting_. She didn't seem to be lying. And she knew the sort of image she projected, and that he could read it. He wondered if she knew she dodged like a fighter.

"Anyway, it's not terribly important. Just be aware that I'm not planning on forcing you to take care of yourself, if that's how you've managed to make it this far." And with that, she went back to her (his) book.


	5. 2004, August

"Granger."

Sherlock was sitting on the arm of the couch, staring at Hermione intently.

"Granger."

"What do you want, Sherlock? I'm busy." Her summer term exams were just a week away, and she had been revising like a madwoman. She was determined to make it through her program sooner rather than later. Plus it gave her an excuse to ignore Sherlock.

Shortly after she moved in, Sherlock had taken to keeping relatively sober and accompanying her as often as possible, trying to prove that she was, in fact, one of his brother's minions. On the plus side, this meant that he took meals reasonably regularly, and spent considerably less time slowly killing brain cells. On the minus side, his constant attention could be very irritating. But she had spent six years living in Gryffindor tower as the best friend of The Boy Who Lived. She was quite accustomed to constant interruptions of her work, a complete lack of privacy, or being followed around and watched. For rent-free housing, she would put up with much worse.

"I have finally decided that you aren't a spy."

She looked up. "Well, I'm glad to see it only took two whole years, Master Detective. Go play with your chemistry set or something. The adults in the room are trying to get their work done."

"Don't you want to know why I've decided you aren't Mycroft's spy?" He sounded somewhat put out.

"Well, if you didn't believe it when your mum invited me to your cousin Cherie's wedding, and you didn't believe it when Anthea broke in here on Mycroft's orders and I freaked out and punched her in the face, and you didn't believe it when I've spent twenty-four of the last twenty-six months _actually_ studying psychology, which is _the reason I am here_ , I don't really know what it could be, and no, I don't really care." She went back to her notes, rolling her eyes at her impossible cousin. "Madman," she added under her breath.

"I'll have you know I'm a high-functioning sociopath, thank you very much," Sherlock quipped. "Emphasis on the _high-functioning_ bit."

Hermione couldn't help but snort at that. There were so many things wrong with that statement. First off, sociopath wasn't even a real psychological term. And Sherlock was far more bipolar than psychopathically inclined. And he could only be considered "high-functioning" about two days out of every five, even when he was wrapped up in a mystery, such as the Case of the Cousin Who Might be a Spy, rather than spending weeks at a time drugged out on the sofa or tracking down illegal materials for experimentation purposes.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night, Holmes."

"Don't be ridiculous, Hermione. Who sleeps at night?"

He had a point: it was four in the morning, and neither of them had gone to bed yet. "It's a phrase, idiot, so I suppose it is implied that _normal_ people, you know, those lucky sods who still have regular bio-rhythms, sleep at night."

He ignored this. "Your trunk. I can't open it." She raised an eyebrow. The trunk was magically sealed. There was no way he would ever be able to open it. She was, quite frankly, surprised it had taken him this long to try, though. "Don't look at me like that. It didn't take me two years to _try_ , it took two years to admit that I _can't_." Ah, that explained it.

"And? How does that prove I'm not a spy?"

"It's _impossible_! Even when the locks are clear, it doesn't open. There are no secret panels or pressure plates. It's apparently made of unlaminated oak, even under a hand lens, but I can't damage it in any way, with physical force, from a knife to a sledge hammer to a contained explosion, or acid etching or burning! The fittings look like brass, but they won't melt, even under an acetylene torch, and they don't react to _anything_ , it's like they're made of gold or something, but just like the wood, you can't damage them, even with a hammer and chisel. It doesn't appear to be held down in any way, or attached to the floor or wall – I managed to slip a bit of string all the way down behind it and under it. But I can't lift it or move it _at all_ , even the tiniest bit. Even if it were entirely full of gold bricks, I still ought to be able to shift it slightly, and if that were the case, I'd never have gotten my string under it."

Hermione smirked. "So I can't be a spy because I have an impossible trunk."

" _No_ , you aren't a spy because Mycroft's spies aren't interesting enough to have a trunk that defies the laws of physics."

"Okay. Glad we've cleared that up. Can I go back to revising, now?"

"NO!" Sherlock was glaring at her in a surprisingly accusatory way. "Tell me what's going on!"

"I'm legally obligated _not_ to tell you what's going on," she explained calmly. "And to take all _reasonable_ precautions against you figuring it out." She wasn't actually trying to keep her magic secret from him. If he managed to figure it out despite the fact that she had followed all the ministry-recommended precautions, she would gladly answer his questions. She supposed he would, in fact, get there eventually.

She could see his mind working. He knew she didn't normally give much thought to legal obligations unless she thought they were important or sensible. "You didn't deny it."

"Well, I could hardly deny something that can be objectively observed, or at least deny it and expect you to believe me."

"And you're not surprised or irritated that I tried to blow up your trunk."

"It's not like you succeeded."

"No, and you knew I wouldn't."

"I would have noticed by now, if you've really been trying to break in the entire time I've been here and you were capable of damaging anything."

"But you weren't worried. So either you're a complete psychopath, or you know what's going on."

"Of course I know what's going on: It's _my trunk._ I'll even give you a hint," Hermione grinned. "Your favorite quote, about how when you've eliminated the impossible, the improbable must be true? It ought to have a corollary: When you've eliminated every explanation as impossible and the phenomenon remains, it's time to revise your definition of _impossible_."

"What kind of hint is that?"

"The basic premise of the scientific method. Go back to Kuhn. You might need to consider a major paradigm shift in order to figure this one out, that's all."

"So… Right. Okay then. And don't think I didn't notice you not addressing the psychopath comment."

She honestly wasn't sure anymore if he really did think she was a psychopath, or if he was just saying it to irritate her, but he had been accusing her of it for months, ever since he had finally asked what she was studying, and why (psychology, because people are strange and fascinating creatures). She had given up denying it. "Can't prove a negative, Sherlock."

And with that, Sherlock retreated into silence. Hermione returned to her revising, and life resumed its normal pace.


	6. 2007, June

(Text conversations)

Sherlock: Granger

Sherlock: Granger

Sherlock: Are you dead?

…

Sherlock: Where is Granger?

Mycroft: She lives with you. Why don't you know?

Sherlock: I wasn't paying attention when she said where she was going.

Sherlock: She might be dead.

Mycroft: Australia.

Sherlock: I don't suppose you would send Anthea over with milk?

Mycroft: You are thirty-three years old, Sherlock. You can get your own milk.

Sherlock: When is Granger coming back?

Mycroft: Saturday

Sherlock: What's today?

Mycroft: Stupid question

Sherlock: I'll wait

…

Mycroft: Sherlock has run out of milk.

Hermione: What do you want me to do about it? I'm in Australia. And off the hook, as he apparently thinks I'm dead.

Mycroft: Oh, nothing. I just thought you might find it amusing that he has decided to wait until you return rather than go fetch it himself.

Hermione: …You did tell him I won't be back for three weeks, right?

Mycroft: I told him you'd be back on Saturday.

Hermione: Yes, three Saturdays from now. If I come back to find a dead Sherlock stinking up my apartment, I'm dumping him in your favorite chair at the Diogenes.

Mycroft: You wouldn't.

Hermione: It's not like they'd mind. ...He wouldn't be talking, at least.

Mycroft: Fine! I'll send someone over to check on him periodically.

Hermione: Tell Anthea to tell him he has no one to blame but himself, as he's the one who drew attention to the fact that he was incapable of buying milk.

…

Hermione: I've changed my flight. I'm coming back early.

Sherlock: I thought you were coming back yesterday.

Hermione: No, I was supposed to stay until the 23rd. I'll be back tomorrow though.

Sherlock: No rush, Anthea brought milk.

Hermione: Not everything is about you, Sherlock

Sherlock: Don't be daft.

Sherlock: Why are you coming back early?

Sherlock: Since it's not to fetch the milk.

Hermione: I'll explain everything when I get back.

Sherlock: If you stop at the market, we're out of bread.

…

Hermione let herself into the flat she shared with Sherlock carrying her single small roll-aboard bag (no bread), eyes red from crying, to find Sherlock sitting in their only armchair, which he had pulled around to face the door directly.

"You said you would explain _everything_ ," he said when she gave him a confused look.

"Yes, yes, fine. Whatever. Fuck the laws, and fuck the game," she dropped her bag and grabbed a sheet of paper off the desk, scribbling out several lines before she handed it to Sherlock. "Here, when I nod at you, say this."

She pulled a long, thin piece of wood from her left sleeve. It was, Sherlock noted, far too long to have been concealed against her forearm. It was straight and polished, the grip worn from long use, with a grain that wrapped around its length. Some kind of vine, perhaps. She cuffed back her sleeve, revealing a nasty series of scars he'd never seen before – letters? O-D? – and grabbed his right hand in her left, tangling their fingers together. She turned their wrists so the undersides were exposed, and dragged the tip of the stick down her own arm, then his, opening twin cuts, though there was no way the stick, with its rounded tip, should have done so.

"I hope you don't have AIDS," she muttered.

"Of course I don't! What are you doing? How did you do that?"

"Two seconds, Sherlock, Merlin!"

"Merlin?"

"Shut up, until I give you the signal."

He considered saying 'yes, ma'am' but decided against it when he saw the look on her face. He nodded. Contrary to popular belief, he was capable of being patient if he believed it would get him answers, and he was very curious about Hermione.

She flipped their arms over and took a step closer to him, forcing the cuts together, and touched their entwined fingers with the stick. It was quite the most barbaric thing Sherlock had ever done, and he had spent nearly fifteen years floating around the seedy underbelly of London.

"I declare by my magic, by my blood, and my will: William Sherlock Scott Holmes is my brother, bound by more than blood alone, by affection and loyalty, by magic, in truth." She nodded.

"I declare by my mind," Sherlock read off the paper, "by my blood and my will: Hermione Jean Granger is my sister, bound by more than blood alone, by affection and loyalty, by magic, in truth." Mad. His cousin had left for Australia and returned emotionally compromised and babbling about _magic._ Completely mad. But interesting.

"In the eyes of the Powers and Magic Itself, called upon to witness this ritual, I declare William Sherlock Scott Holmes brother and heir of the Head of House Granger, bound by magic, blood and will, on this day and forevermore, until death and beyond. So mote it be."

A wave of cold washed over Sherlock, stemming from his hand, still clutched in Hermione's, racing through his blood, to his heart and head, wrapping around him and then… it was gone. She dropped his hand, looking at the thin, flat, healed scar which had formed in place of the cut on her wrist. There was one on his own wrist, as well. Impossible, really. With that degree of bloodflow it ought to have taken _weeks_ for the cut to heal.

"What the _fucking_ hell was that?"

"Magic, Sherlock." Hermione dropped onto the couch.

"What? Don't be daft. There's no such thing as magic."

"Impossible trunk, remember? I told you you'd need to consider a paradigm shift."

"But… but… fine." _New hypothesis: Magic is real and can explain all the "impossible" things that happen in this flat… Experiment: …? ... Test for consistency in explanation?_

Now it was Hermione's turn to say, "What?"

"Oh, I have questions. I just need to figure out which one to ask first."

"Of course." She sat, watching him, resigned expression firmly in place.

"Assuming magic is real, and leaving that alone for the time being, given the evidence of the impossible trunk," Hermione nodded "Why did you just declare us siblings?"

"Because it's against the laws of Magical Britain to tell a non-magical person about magic, except in very specific circumstances. One of those is if they have a muggleborn sibling. We are now legally considered brother and sister by the laws of Magical Britain… at least… I think the technicality ought to hold up if I'm called on it…" she trailed off, perhaps considering all the potential ramifications of that little ceremony. "The government would modify your memory and slap me with a major fine and possibly gaol time for saying anything, otherwise. Anyway, you now fall under section twelve-C, paragraph 2, subsection alpha of the International Statute of Secrecy. More or less."

"Okay… leaving aside the impossibility of magic and the 'legal' bits and the very concept of a 'Magical Britain,' which you talk about like its own country," "Semi-autonomous political entity," Hermione interjected. "Right… why now? It's been two years, ten months, and four days since I admitted your trunk was impossible."

Hermione sighed. "One of the _other_ ways I could have legally told you about magic would have been if you figured out that I was a witch _despite_ my taking reasonable precautions against it and then asked me about it. I was hoping you'd get it. You never like it when people just _give_ you the answers. But you were taking too long. You demanded I explain _everything_ , and I'm sick of hiding it, even though I'm really not trying _that_ hard. Honestly, you don't think I clean the flat by hand, do you? And I did something ten years ago that involves magic, and had to follow up on it recently, and I'm second-guessing my more recent decision, and I want to tell you about it and have you tell me I made the right choice, and just not judge me over it, because you're honestly about the only person I know who would probably do the same thing."

Hmmm… "Does this have something to do with your parents in Australia?"

"Oh, I didn't think you were paying attention. Didn't you say you thought I was dead?"

"Well, not really, I just didn't want to deal with the crowd at the market, and no, I wasn't, but after Mycroft said you were in Australia, I did manage to put two and two together."

"Of course. Because it was inconvenient for you. Narcissist."

"Psychopath."

"I'm not, you know," Hermione said, tears in her eyes. "This would be a lot easier if I was."

"What?" Sherlock was terribly curious now.

"Well, skipping a lot of back-story that I'm sure I'll tell you later, in 1997, when I was nineteen, or, well seventeen, legally – side effect of time-travel" _TIME TRAVEL?_ "– please don't ask right now – I was involved in a war. It was a small scale thing, because it's a small scale society, Magical Britain. And diffuse, because distance doesn't really matter if you have magic to keep in touch. I suppose for the most part it resembled gang warfare, more than anything else. From June of 1995 until July of 1996, it was a sort of underground, cold-war situation. There were still casualties on both sides, of course, but it wasn't until the summer of 1997 that things really started to disintegrate into all out attacks. Guerilla tactics on both sides. One of my friends, Harry, he was what you might call a strategic asset, I'll explain why later. But I was in danger because I was muggleborn – that's a witch born to non-magical parents – and his friend, so I went on the run with him and another friend from school. We avoided society as much as possible from June of 1997 until May of 1998, when we managed to win a decisive victory."

"So what does this have to do with your parents in Australia?"

"I… I _obliviated_ them. In 1997, before we went on the run. Locked away their memories. I… I gave them a back-story, cover-identities, and sent them to Australia. I decided to wait ten years, until the last supporters of the Dark side's network could be rounded up, and then I'd bring them back… but I never told them. They would never have agreed to go."

"So… you just erased their memories? Everything they ever knew?" Sherlock was appalled. He didn't tend to think of things in terms of _right_ and _wrong,_ but that was just _wrong_.

"No, not everything. But the most important things. Their identities. The fact that they had a daughter. Their personalities changed too, a bit, but that was just because they were much more relaxed in Australia, I think. And it wasn't all gone, as I said, just… locked away. I always meant to bring them back."

"You can _do_ that?" She better not have ever done it to _him_.

"Well, to most people. Not everyone. Most witches and wizards train their minds to resist things like that, and your mind, for instance, is far too organized. You'd realize something was wrong and drive yourself nuts until you found a way to revive the old memories. That's part of the reason I didn't want to just _tell_ you, you know. You'd have been obliviated, and clumsily, too. The Ministry squad's not as good as I am."

"How do you know what my mind looks like?"

"There's a spell, _legilimens_ , that lets you get inside another person's mind. I used it on you once, back when I first moved in. Just to make sure you weren't _actually_ going to try to murder me in my sleep, after I re-organized all your things. Protip: never get in a staring contest with a witch." Sherlock nodded warily.

"So did you go get your parents then, and beg forgiveness for playing around with their heads?"

"No. I went, but then… they were happy there, Sherlock. So much happier than I ever saw them when I was a kid. I talked to them for a bit. And… they said they never wanted children. That they would have resented a child in their lives… so… I left them. I left early, and came home. Because I couldn't stand to give them their real lives back and make them miserable. So am I a terrible person?"

Sherlock thought about it for a long moment. If it had been _him_ , he would never have forgiven her. His mind was his fortress and his refuge. It was the thing he valued most about himself. It was what made him _Sherlock,_ and not some other, normal, boring idiot. But if all memories of her were gone, he'd never know to not forgive her in the first place. In Sherlock's world, the mind was the self and the self was the mind. But if one mind, one self was gone, changed, into a different potential self, with all the same abilities, but in a different place and time, with different experiences… was that really so terrible? But that wasn't the question, was it?

She was just sitting there, tears in her eyes, watching him think. "If it helps, think of it like one of those silly abstract ethics problems," she suggested.

He sneered at her. "You don't want an _ethical_ answer. You already know that."

"No, I want you to tell me what your answer would be, if it were an abstract problem."

"Who says it's not?"

"And you call me a psychopath." Sherlock supposed that was supposed to be a joke, but it wasn't really funny.

"Well you did kill your parents," he said coldly. She flinched back as though she'd been struck. "You destroyed _them_ , their _identities_ , what made them _themselves_ , and replaced them with… whoever they think they are now. Dan and Emma Granger are gone. Even if you brought them back now, they'd have lost ten years of their lives, like waking up from a coma or something – it wouldn't be the same as if they'd never left, and then you'd be killing off the potential selves they've developed over the past ten years, wouldn't you? No, you've done enough damage. In answer to your "abstract" question: It was the right choice, leaving them alone."

Some strong emotion flashed across Hermione's features, but then the tears vanished. Her eyes went blank, her expression hard. It was a look he had only seen before on professional killers. He hid a shudder at the thought of what his little cousin must have done in her war to have a face like that. "It was a necessary evil," she said, completely emotionlessly. "They knew too much. If they had been caught and tortured or _legilimized_ … It could have compromised my mission. It was, and I do _not_ say this lightly, a matter of National Security. I don't even know if Mycroft knew what was really going on."

Sherlock raised a skeptical eyebrow at this statement. "They sent a bunch of seventeen-year-old schoolchildren on a mission which could have compromised national security?"

"Oh, no. They sent a bunch of teenagers to kill an immortal, sadistic, psychopathic wizard who was trying to take over Magical Britain, enslave muggleborn witches and wizards like myself, and from there, take over muggle Britain, and presumably the rest of the UK. National security was already _compromised_. We were just doing damage control. A last-ditch effort, really."

"And in order to kill this 'immortal' wizard, you had to erase yourself from your parents' lives? It's like the plot of some stupid, terribly written novel."

Hermione shrugged. "Wizards, on the whole, are not known for their common sense, and unfortunately I was young and stupid enough to do as I was told I had to do by people I trusted to know better than myself. I did the arithmancy, and the odds of our success after our leader was assassinated in 1997 were something like one in twenty-five hundred thousand. Obliviating my parents brought it _up_ to one in a million. Harry, Ron and I were on the run, mostly hiding out in forests I had visited as a child. I had no way of knowing what details of my childhood the Death Eaters might have been able to use to track us down. It would have been _impossible_ for my parents to hide any information from the kind of interrogation they would have used. It was safer if they forgot I had ever existed. I sent them to Australia for their own safety, but revising their memories was a necessary precaution."

"Well I suppose you can rest easy, now, knowing that your mission was a success, the people they were died a quick death, and the people they are now are happy," and he went to his room, leaving his cousin on the sofa, staring into space with dead eyes. He needed to think about all of this.

…

Hermione felt as though she were moving slowly, underwater, for the rest of the week. Sherlock thought she had killed her parents. _Sherlock_ thought that she had as good as murdered them, by taking away their memories. He was so appalled that he hadn't even asked the thousand and one questions she _knew_ he must have about the magical world. He had just gone into his room and played the violin for hours and hours.

She didn't know what she had expected.

No, that was a lie. She had _expected_ him to tell her that it was okay, that it didn't matter. This was the man who jumped up and down like a giddy schoolgirl when there was a new serial killer reported in the papers, who had once robbed a mortuary to acquire a pre-embalming human eyeball. He had no concept of the value of a human life. She had expected him to understand that sometimes it's necessary to do terrible things to one or two people to save thousands. But maybe she hadn't made that clear.

Or maybe she had just underestimated the extent to which he valued the human mind. Even the minds of stupid, normal people, who weren't in the exclusive club of people he deemed worthy of talking to (Himself, Mycroft, and until Monday, Hermione) apparently had value.

She skipped classes for the rest of the week, since she wasn't expected to be back yet, anyway, and laid in her room for an entire day, crying for the stupidity of her younger self, and the loss of the parents she hadn't really _known,_ who hadn't really known _her_ , since she was eleven, and went off to Hogwarts for the first time.

On the Friday after she returned, she was drinking tea and staring at nothing, when Sherlock re-joined her on the couch.

"Why did you want _my_ opinion, Hermione?" he asked quietly.

 _Because I thought you would understand,_ she thought, but she answered with another truth: "Because… you're the closest thing I have to family, anymore, I suppose. And I wanted someone important to me to tell me that even though it felt like I did the wrong thing, leaving them there, I really didn't. And I hoped you wouldn't care. I mean, you never knew them. Only met them once, right, twenty-five years ago? Why should it matter to you that Dan and Emma Granger are gone and never coming back?"

"So you thought that because I don't care about them, and you're right, I don't, I wouldn't still see the act of destroying a mind as a terrible thing?" Sherlock looked offended.

"Not _destroying a mind_ , giving them a new past, and a different future," Hermione explained in halting phrases. "A world where they never had a daughter they didn't want and had hardly spoken to for six years, never had to know about magic, weren't in danger from a war they had no business knowing about. They can still think and love and reason and do anything they want to do, just… without me in their lives. They remember their parents, and friends, and the places they used to live, but with different names. My mum still remembers that she had an older brother and they had a fight about something stupid twenty-five years ago, and they haven't seen each other since. She would never have called him up, again, anyway. My dad still remembers his first job as a dental assistant. They just think they just grew bored of life in the suburbs and decided to leave and do something else with their lives."

Sherlock weighed this additional information for some time. "If you had said that in the first place, I might have talked to you on Tuesday."

Hermione smiled weakly. "Dad's taken up surfing, and mum's painting now, and they bought a pub and they're _happy_. If they had never had me, they could have done all of this ten, fifteen years earlier. I don't know that they would have, of course, but… it's a possibility. And they still have all the potential they ever did, and all the intelligence, and wit. But my dad's not all bitter and sarcastic, and my mum doesn't snap like she always did when I was little, and they act like they're in love, like I never got to see them…"

"That doesn't matter," Sherlock pointed out. "It shouldn't matter, that they're happy now, or not. You couldn't have known, when you did it, that they would be happier after."

"I know that. I know that it was objectively _wrong_ , to take their choices away, especially without talking to them about it and that's why that spell is considered Dark Arts. If I'm honest, I knew it, then. I just… didn't think of the consequences. And I should have. I've learned better ways of making people disappear now. I could have faked their deaths or something, I suppose. Sneaked them into Witness Protection in the States or something. I should have realized back then that the mind-wipe wouldn't work as a long-term solution. But… as I said, I thought it was necessary, and now, knowing how it turned out? I… wouldn't change it. Obviously. I didn't. I couldn't. I honestly do think they're better off now, and if Dan and Emma Granger could meet Wendell and Monica Wilkins, I think they'd say the same. And, well… _that's_ what I wanted your opinion on. I was just really upset about the fact that they never wanted me, and didn't explain it very well, I think."

"But you've clearly already made up your mind. So why bother asking?"

"Affirmation," she shrugged. "Sometimes I doubt myself. Shocking, I know. Not for long, but enough to feel guilt."

"Well, fine, then. I think you were right not to do anything else to them. Another bad choice wouldn't make the first one better."

"Thank you," Hermione said quietly, a tension she hadn't realized she had been carrying seeping out of her shoulders.

There was a long moment of silence before Sherlock asked, "Is that why you've spent three days moping around? Because you've been feeling guilty?"

"Well, no… I made my peace with not asking their permission ages ago. It has been ten years, and believe it or not, you're not the only person who thinks that the mind ought to be sacred and I was absolutely wrong to mess with their memories in the first place. I was… quite thoroughly shunned, that first month on the run, when I told Harry and Ron what I'd done. I mean, they were terribly impressed, but really, really horrified. 'Brilliant but scary,' they put it…

"No, I was… mourning, I suppose. Because until I came back, I still had some vague idea that I'd see them again, you know? That everything could go back to the way it was. And then I decided that it shouldn't. But that meant they were gone forever. So, yes. I effectively killed my parents. It was kind of an accident. The action was premeditated, but the full extent of the consequences was not anticipated. Thank you for putting it so baldly. No one else would have. But now I've had time to think about it, and even when you put it like that, I don't regret it. They weren't tortured to death, or used against me, and they definitely would have been, if they'd stuck around. I'm sorry they're gone, and I'm sorry I didn't know them very well after I moved out at eleven, and I'm sorry I didn't tell them more about my life at Hogwarts and the war and all kinds of things, but I believe I made the best choices I could at every step along the way, and I'm not sorry I'm letting them go."

"You don't need to justify yourself to me," Sherlock said in a bored tone. Hermione smiled, and he added, "But you're _definitely_ a psychopath."

She threw a decorative couch pillow at him. "I am not, jackass."

"So tell me about Magical Britain."

"Oh, we're going to need more tea for this… In the summer of 1991, when I was eleven years old, I got a letter from a school called Hogwarts. It was delivered by one of the people I later came to respect most in the world, Minerva McGonagall…"


	7. 2008, January

"Sherlock! I've got you a birthday present!"

"Is it a book?" he asked without looking up from his current project.

"I don't _always_ give books!" she protested, giving him a quick hug. She knew how he felt about hugs, but insisted that it was appropriate on his birthday. He didn't even bother complaining anymore.

"Yes you do, and then you take them back and read them before I get a chance."

"Well, I would read them first if you wouldn't say anything about it."

"Why does that matter?"

"I don't know. It just seems rude when you point it out. It's not a book, anyway."

Sherlock examined his younger cousin carefully. She smelled of espresso and second-hand lavender perfume, so she had been on a coffee date, and with one of her girlfriends rather than a man. She wasn't holding anything, and there was nothing in her pockets. That didn't mean she couldn't be hiding something physically impossible in her pocket book or something, but she generally didn't because other people who weren't in the know might notice. The only other time she had given him a gift that wasn't a book, it had been intangible: a trip. Only one of her girlfriends worked anywhere he would want to go.

"You finally got Molly Hooper to let me observe an autopsy."

Hermione grinned. "It wasn't as difficult as it might have been. I think she's got a bit of a crush on you after the Yule Party. If you pay her a bit of attention, she might bend the rules and let you do a few experiments, post autopsy, of course."

"You are my favorite family member," Sherlock informed his cousin with a small smile of his own.

"I know… but that's not really saying much, since the only other contenders are Mycroft and your mum."

"I have another cousin. You went to her wedding."

"Well, yes, I know, but I'm not entirely convinced you remember her name."

Sherlock waved a hand dismissively. "It's _not important_."

Hermione smirked. "It's _Cherie_."

"I knew it started with a 'C'."


	8. 2009, Late May

"Congratulations, Dr. Granger," a deep voice whispered in Hermione's ear.

She twisted around, flinging her arms around the speaker's neck. "Lyle! You came!"

"Of course I did. You asked me to, didn't you?"

"Well, it's been a while… I wasn't sure you'd want to come. But I'm glad you did."

"Me too. Would you like to have dinner with me this weekend, to celebrate?"

Hermione gave her on-again, off-again lover an evaluating stare, judging his sincerity. "Sure. I'd like that. Saturday, at seven."

"All right, princess. It's a date."

"Come on! I want you to meet my friends from school," she dragged him away by the wrist to rescue Harry and Ginny from a somewhat-manic Sherlock. Introducing Lyle to the Potters would be awkward, but probably less awkward on the whole than allowing Sherlock to harass them with obscure questions about magical theory, which Ginny would berate her about later. "Sherlock, you remember Lyle."

"Of course I remember Lyle, Granger." Sherlock hated Lyle. He slipped away, probably because she had threatened to do terrible things to him if he ruined her graduation party. She had never had one before, and wanted it to go well.

"Mr. Holmes," Lyle nodded to the older man. Sherlock ignored him.

"And this is my best friend, Harry Potter and his wife, Ginny."

"Charmed. Is Ginny short for Virginia?" Lyle asked.

Hermione cringed internally, but Ginny, who hated her name, simply said, "I prefer Ginny. After all, Virginia's hardly the name for a mother of three, is it?"

Thankfully Lyle laughed. Most people did think Ginny was funny. "And what do you do for a living, Harry?"

Harry had managed, over the years, to develop the terrible wizarding habit of being pants at blending in, even though he was raised in the muggle world. At least the Potters had spent enough time around Hermione that they had had to rehearse this lie before. "I'm a DI up near Edinburgh. Yourself?"

"Studying law at Cambridge. Just thought I'd pop into town for the weekend and congratulate _Doctor_ Hermione, you know."

"Ah, yes, the same for us…"

The conversation limped on for several equally painful minutes, until Lyle excused himself for a drink and was summarily drugged by Sherlock. Her cousin wouldn't admit it, of course, but Hermione had lived with the man for nearly seven years: that hint of smugness in the set of his lips said he'd done it and wanted her to know, no matter how innocent and bored he pretended to be. She rolled her eyes. No, Sherlock wouldn't be in trouble for this. Lyle ought to know better, really. He had been hanging around, off and on for three years: at this point, he should know not to drink _anything_ Sherlock gave him. He was almost as bad as the twins. Honestly. Overgrown children, the lot of them.


	9. 2009, July

"Sherlock…"

"Sherlock…"

"Five minutes, Granger."

"I'm pregnant, Sherlock."

There was a loud crash as Sherlock dropped a petri dish full of coagulating hemoglobin. "You're _pregnant_?"

Hermione nodded, face very white as she stood, immobilized in the bathroom doorway.

"Would you have been any _less_ pregnant in five minutes?"

Hermione broke down into hysterical giggles at Sherlock's put-upon expression and slowly sank to the floor.

…

"Of course it's yours you fucking idiot! I haven't _been_ with anyone else."

"But we used protection!"

"Obviously it failed."

"You have to get rid of it. There's still a few weeks, right? I'll drive you to the clinic this Saturday."

"Lyle… I'm not getting rid of it."

"Don't you think I should have some say in this? _I don't want to be a father, Hermione!_ "

"You don't _have_ to be. Fucking hell, I'm not going to ask you marry me or for money or whatever. I just thought you should _know_."

…

"Have you given any more thought to the idea of abortion?"

"No, and I'm not going to."

"I'm really not comfortable with this, Hermione."

"Well I'm really not comfortable with you."

"Do you want me to go?"

Hermione was silent for a long moment. "Yeah. Yes, actually. Lyle, I don't think things are working out for us. They haven't been for a long time. Fuck, I don't even _like_ you anymore. Yes. You should go. And you shouldn't come back. I'll send someone from my solicitor's office with a parental rights waiver for you to sign. Just… leave me alone."

"Fine then, I guess we're done!"

Lyle slammed the door on the way out, and Hermione didn't bother to get up and lock it after him.

Sherlock returned several hours later to find her asleep on the couch, smiling for the first time in the weeks since she had told him she was pregnant. He draped a blanket over her and she opened her eyes.

"I broke things off with Lyle."

"Good. I never liked him. Lestrade has a new case for me! A locked room, a missing will, it's all very murder-mystery-theater, except there's no butler to have done it."

"Oh, and who did, then?" She sat up, rubbing her eyes.

"The mistress, but the trick will be in proving it…"

There was something incredibly reassuring about Sherlock's complete disinterest in the fact that she was alone and pregnant, unemployed, and had no idea what she was going to do with her life. It was like intangible, but undeniable proof that the world was not coming to an end. Life went on. Stupid people killed other stupid people. Questions were asked, mysteries were solved, and the world kept turning.


	10. 2009, September

Sherlock stumbled into the flat, clutching his side, and collapsed onto the living area rug, only just managing to lock the door behind him.

"Granger! Hermione are you home?" he called out quietly.

"Sherlock?" Hermione spoke at a normal volume. "What's wro—oh!"

"Gunshot, just a graze, but the –"

"Shut up and let me have a look at you." She pulled her wand out and started removing his clothes as she spoke. "This is _not_ just a graze, Sherlock Holmes!"

There were few places that a bullet could hit a man as thin as Sherlock and not do serious damage. This one, fortunately of small caliber, had managed to lodge in his right tenth rib, after shattering the eleventh. "What the fuck were you doing? Standing on top of him?"

"Not important. They _followed me_ , Granger! We have to get out of here."

"Yes, we do. We're going to St. Bart's right now, and then you're going to tell me _exactly_ what you were doing and what went wrong." Someone began pounding on the door. "This is going to be uncomfortable," Hermione warned, and hauled Sherlock to his feet, holding him close and turning on the spot, pulling the two of them through the horrible compression of apparition-space and into a small supply closet off the St. Bart's morgue.

Sherlock collapsed into a mop bucket and nearly brought an entire shelf of sterilizing equipment down on top of himself. "What the bloody fuck was that?" he asked, just as Molly Hooper wrenched open the door.

"Hermione? Sherlock? What?"

"Not important, Molly," Hermione said in her most Sherlockian tone. "Sherlock's been shot. We need to get him up to Intake right away."

"Oh, but… how?"

"Can't say. Not won't, can't. Sorry, love, but this is rather urgent."

"I'm _bleeding_ , Miss Hooper," Sherlock pointed out.

Molly sighed, looking back and forth between the two of them. And then she capitulated. "Sometimes you two are just alike, you know. Come on, then, I'll make sure the coast is clear."

…

They arrived back at the apartment several hours later to find it a complete shambles. Books and papers had been thrown about, ripped apart and burned. Dishes were smashed. The table and all of Sherlock's experiments had been overturned.

"Fucking idiots," Hermione muttered. "Pull the curtains, Sherlock."

"I can't, they've been shredded," he pointed out irritably. Hermione had informed the doctor of his history of opiate abuse, and he had consequently been given a much weaker painkiller than he preferred.

"Fine. Just a second." She stormed into her bedroom and returned with an armload of linens, pinning them over the broken windows and shredded curtains. She then, much to Sherlock's obvious delight (she hardly ever used magic in front of him, for the sake of her own sanity when faced with the interrogation which inevitably followed), proceeded to repair the torn papers and burned books. She vanished the remnants of his ruined experiments and restored the shattered glassware. The tableware followed suit. The table and chairs righted themselves. The couch, cushions torn to shreds, knitted itself back together. Bullets pulled themselves from the plaster, which smoothed itself back over, and even the bone fragments that were all that was left of the Desk Skull reformed, as though untouched. After a quick peek outside to make sure no one would notice, the glass that had fallen from the windows sealed them again and the curtains were restored to their former, un-shredded state.

"That was seriously impressive," Sherlock said. Hermione smiled. The most complimentary thing was that he had commented on something obvious.

"Yes, well, you're lucky I thought to put Damage Charms on everything when I moved in. Unfortunately I did the last update sweep on the first, so anything you've annotated or changed since then is gone, and I'm not even going to try to restore your laptop. Remember how magic and electricity don't do well together? The _best_ thing that could happen is I'd wipe your hard drive."

"This is great, though. Thank you, Hermione." Sherlock sounded genuinely relieved that his books papers were not actually destroyed.

She collapsed onto the couch next to him. "You're very welcome, Sherlock."

They sat in silence for a long moment, then spoke at the same time. Hermione repeated herself first.

"I don't think I can live with you, anymore, Sherlock."

"Why not?"

"Sherlock, I'm pregnant. I'm _going to have a baby_ in six months. I can't live with you if you're going to keep up the whole consulting detective thing – you make too many enemies – and I'd never ask you to give it up."

"But where would you go? You don't have a job, even," he pointed out, in the plaintive tones of someone who had never had to work a day in his life.

"I've been looking, and I do have savings, Sherlock. It's not as though I've been paying rent _here_ , and Mycroft was paying my tuition."

"What? Why?"

"Oh, we made a bet when I first moved in: if I could manage you, he'd pay my tuition. If not, he'd find me another apartment, but I'd have to pay my own tuition. I'd say it worked out pretty well."

Sherlock glared half-seriously at his cousin. "So you _were_ a spy!"

"Ha, no, I never told him anything about you. Just, you know, made sure you didn't OD on your benders, and provided a steady source of mystery to keep you more or less entertained for the last seven and a half years between cases."

"Sneaky bitch."

Hermione smirked. "I'm kind of surprised you didn't figure it out ages ago. The Great Sherlock Holmes, baffled for years by the Significantly Less Arrogant Hermione Granger."

"I _did_ figure it out, you just lied about it when I caught you out," the man said with a petulant pout.

"Nonsense. You thought I was one of his agents. I really am your cousin. I just conned your brother out of thousands of pounds for doing something I would have done anyway."

Sherlock snorted. "Oh, yeah, you're family alright… You realize if you leave, I will be forced to go back to tormenting Mycroft with my behavior."

"Aww, here I thought I trained you to act like a normal person, and come to find out you always knew how."

Sherlock shook his head fiercely, dark curls flying in every direction. "Of course I knew how. I'm an excellent actor. You just keep things from getting boring. There's always something new I can think of to ask about the magical world, or magic itself. If you're not here, I'll get bored again."

"And go back to torturing Mycroft."

"Yes."

"What did you do when I was at work or school all the time for the last seven years, honestly? I know you are, in fact, capable of occupying yourself if you want to."

Sherlock ignored this. "But I've become accustomed to having someone to talk to about quantum physics at four in the morning."

"Get a flatmate."

"But Hermione, every potential flatmate in the world is an idiot." Sherlock said this earnestly, with a completely straight face. He might even have believed it.

"That's statistically impossible," Hermione objected. "Besides, you wouldn't want to live with a baby, anyway. None of your experiments in the past three years has been child-friendly, and they cry when you do things like play the violin at three am, and you have to feed and water them regularly… and there are diapers and things." Sherlock shuddered. "There's no way I'd let you experiment on my kid, and I _know_ you'd want to. Plus I _am_ looking for a job. The days of staying up all night talking about physics and magic are over, anyway. It's the end of an era, Sherlock. I have to move out."

"Hmmm… Hermione Granger, age thirty-two, finally leaves school, gets a job, keeps adult hours. A sign of the apocalypse indeed," Sherlock teased.

"I'm only thirty on my passport. And I had a job for almost four years before I moved here."

"Whatever." He waved a hand dismissively.

"Jackass."

"Witch."

"Narcissist."

"Psychopath."

"I am not!"

"Are too."

"Child."

"Mother."

"Yeah, that's weird, isn't it?"

"Very."

…

(Text conversation)

Mycroft: You know he's going to be insufferable as soon as you move out.

Hermione: So give him an allowance and make him get his own place. He's thirty-five years old. He is capable of taking care of himself, you just never make him do it.

Mycroft: I have my doubts regarding this capability of which you speak.

Hermione: You sent Anthea to buy milk for him while I was in Australia.

Mycroft: Point.

Mycroft: But he is irritating.

Hermione: Mycroft Joseph Holmes, need I remind you of your own age? It is time to put your foot down and stop letting Sherlock manipulate you into taking care of him.

Mycroft: Point.

Mycroft: Are you still looking for a job?

Hermione: You know I am.

Mycroft: I have a senior analyst's position open.

Hermione: You know I don't have the experience for that.

Mycroft: It's synthesizing information and writing reports. Moderate security clearance. You are qualified. I would not offer otherwise.

Hermione: Done. When do I start?

Mycroft: First of the month. I'll send a messenger in the morning with specifics and your contract.


	11. 2009, November

[17 missed calls]

Sherlock: Mycroft has given me an allowance and kicked me out of the flat.

Sherlock: He says it was your idea.

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: I am BORED

Sherlock: How could you do this to me?

Sherlock: Mum is my new favorite family member.

Sherlock: Nevermind, mum's just asked me when I'm getting married. But I'm still not happy with you.

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Answer me

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: You suck

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Hermioneeeeeeeeee

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: Stop ignoring meeeeeee

Sherlock: Hermione

Hermione: I only told him to put his foot down if you were being deliberately irritating and/or childish. It's not like he isn't still giving you an allowance. Learn to budget. It's not difficult. PS, I've not been I've not been ignoring you, I've been at work.

Hermione: Find a flat, find a flat mate, and pretend to be an adult.

Sherlock: You suck

Sherlock: I hope you die in a fire

Sherlock: I will bother you more later, Lestrade is here

Hermione: Have fun storming the castle. Tell Greg I say hello.

Sherlock: Greg?

Hermione: Lestrade. Idiot.

…

Hermione: Have you found a flat yet?

Sherlock: 221B Baker St. Owner is Hudson. Bit pricy, but she's given me a discount for prior services.

Hermione: I'll be sure to stop by this weekend. Need help moving?

Sherlock: Mycroft is sending minions. Come on Sunday, should be settled then.


	12. 2009, December

"Good lord, the parasite is getting enormous."

Hermione turned to see Sherlock assessing her baby bump. "Merry Christmas to you, too, Sherlock. I thought I told you to get a flat mate, not a pet chimpanzee."

He shuddered. His current flat mate was an innane, soft-spoken man, who had a bad habit of ignoring hints that no one was interested in anything he had to say, and Hermione found something about his manner extremely off-putting. Apparently Sherlock agreed. "The first one was worse. This is the best one that's applied. I'm betting I can force him out by the end of the month, though. Mrs. Hudson said she'll split his fee for breaking the lease contract if I do manage it."

"You're incorrigible. By the way, baby's a girl. Text me a name suggestion by New Year's, please."

"Will do, got to hide from Kimball."

"I thought his name was Kevin."

"It might be. Laters." Sherlock vanished inexplicably quickly for such a tall and distinctive-looking man. Hermione looked around to see that his awful flat mate was closing in again, doubtless waiting to trap her into another awful, unending conversation.

Hermione: Fuck you, I can't waddle that fast!

Sherlock: Karma, bitch.

Molly: Need a rescue?

Hermione: PLEASE!

"Ah, no, thanks, erm…" She had no idea what the short, weasely-looking man had been saying, but 'no' seemed like a safe response anyway.

"Kevin."

"No, thank you, Kevin, I'm fine." She would not take a drink from him or go sit anywhere with him if she could possibly help it. Where was Molly?

"Hermione! How are you! I haven't seen you in ages! Come sit with me and we'll catch up on baby news." Molly finally arrived, drink in hand, awful Christmas jumper jingling, to rescue the ever-more-desperate Hermione. _Thank Merlin_.

Hermione positioned herself to shut Kevin out of the conversation, but that didn't stop him. "I love babies! When are you due?"

"End of March," she threw over her shoulder. "So Molly, my OBGYN was talking about how the mucosal plug is forming and…"

"If you'll excuse me…" Kevin finally left at the mention of reproductive health.

"Oooh, you're mean, Hermione. He looked a bit green, even."

"He deserved it. He's been following me around all night. So, when are you coming over to see my flat? It's been nearly three months already."

"Well, you know, I thought I'd wait until I could bring wine as a housewarming gift…" Molly was twisting her fingers together, clearly guilty about not having visited already, and probably thinking it was too late to come now just to see the new place, since it had already been so long. Silly girl.

"You'd better not wait that long. You remember my friend Ginny? She's throwing a surprise baby shower the last weekend of January. Say you'll come!"

Molly's face lit up. "Of course I'll be there. But, um… why do you already know, if it's a surprise?"

"Oh, her husband can't lie to me to save his life." Hermione grinned.

…

Hermione: Happy New Year. Did you get rid of the idiot yet?

Sherlock: Yesterday.

Sherlock: You too.

Sherlock: Molly says you're having a baby shower. Am I invited?

Hermione: No, of course not. Girls only.

Hermione: And Harry.

Sherlock: Why does Harry get to come if I don't?

Hermione: Because I've known him since we were eleven, and secretly he is a girl.

Sherlock: I suspect you are lying.

Hermione: Yes. Harry is not invited either.

Sherlock: So I'll be there at one, then.

Hermione: No.

Hermione: You're not invited.

Hermione: Don't you dare show up.

Sherlock: Does one bring gifts to a baby shower? I am asking for a friend.

Hermione: You don't have friends.

Hermione: Google it.

Hermione: and you're still not invited.

Sherlock: I have so got friends.

Sherlock: There's you, and Lestrade…

Hermione: I'm family, and you don't know Lestrade's first name, so he doesn't count.

Sherlock: Miranda.

Hermione: No, it's still Greg.

Sherlock: For the baby.

Hermione: Oh, yeah. I like it.

…

Hermione: Mission accomplished

Ginny: Excellent. I got the twins, too.

Hermione: Great, I'll tell Molly the real date, then.


	13. 2010, January

Sherlock: Guess what.

Hermione: What?

Sherlock: Serial suicides.

Hermione: Different victims?

Sherlock: Yes?

Hermione: Not certain, but I think they call those homicides.

Sherlock: Shut up. Smartarse. I've got a new flatmate.

Hermione: And you /like/ this one.

Sherlock: He likes me. Thinks I'm brilliant.

Hermione: Instead of an asshole?

Sherlock: Well, according to his blog it's more like as well as.

Hermione: What's his blog?

Sherlock: .uk

Hermione: Arrogant, imperious, pompous, "not safe" but fascinating…

Hermione: You're going to be totally codependent heterosexual lifemates, I can already tell.


	14. 2010, February

Hermione: Your new favorite person thinks you're a psychopath.

Sherlock: I tried to introduce him to the term high-functioning sociopath, but he's a bit dense.

Hermione: Don't confuse the poor boy.

Sherlock: He's 39.

Hermione: He writes like he's younger.

Hermione: I stand by my characterization.

Hermione: When you get bored, torture Mycroft for these reports he's demanding I finish by Monday.

Sherlock: Anything for you.

Hermione: Anything you'd do anyway


	15. 2010, March

Sherlock: What are you doing?

Sherlock: I'm bored.

Sherlock: Talk to me

Sherlock: Hermioneeee

Hermione: This is ginny. Hermione is in labor and says to go bother John or she will put you permanently out of your misery once she's out of bed.

Sherlock: Fine, be that way.

Hermione: Hermione says you are a terrible future godfather cousin brother and human being. Also you are a narcissist and mycroft just texted saying you are shooting holes in your apartment stop it.

Sherlock: goddamnit.

Sherlock: Ginny, tell Mycroft to shove it.

Hermione: I am the midwife. Do it yourself. Ducking men.

Sherlock: There's been an explosion across the street from my apartment. Lay low for the next couple of days.

Hermione: I just gave birth. That was the plan anyway, idiot. Miranda Jane Granger, and you'd better not forget it, seeing as you picked out the first bit.

…

Sherlock: Someone is playing a game with me. I think I'm in love. Help.

Hermione: Is this the sort of game where other people get hurt?

Sherlock: Not if I win. That is what makes it fun.

Hermione: Idiot.

Hermione: Reading blog. Busy week?

Hermione: Fifty quid on your loverboy being Jim from IT

Sherlock: Who?

Hermione: Molly's gay boyfriend.

…

Hermione: Was that explosion in Glasgow part of your game?

Hermione: Sherlock!

Hermione: At least tell me you did everything you could to stop it.

Sherlock: Yes. It was the hostage's fault. If you could tell John that, that would be lovely.

Hermione: Don't be daft. I don't even know John.


	16. 2010, April

Hermione: You owe me fifty quid. And a life debt.

Sherlock: What did you do?

Hermione: Called Jim from IT, obviously.

Sherlock: Why did he stop?

Hermione: Why did you play his game?

Sherlock: Repeat: I think I'm in love. Help.

Sherlock: How do you make it stop?

Sherlock: Hermioneeeee

Hermione: *condescending head pats*

Sherlock: Psychopath

Hermione: Only when I have to be.

Sherlock: …and screencap

Hermione: Jackass. Come meet your niece.

…

Sherlock: John is in New Zealand. Want to go visit your parents?

Hermione: Pretty sure he went there to get some space. You should not under any circumstances go stalk your flatmate in New Zealand.

Sherlock: He took Sara with him.

Hermione: Sarah is his girlfriend. He is not trying to get away from Sarah.

Sherlock: How do you know?

Hermione: Sarah does not get him blown up or shot at. If you are that bored, come over and babysit so I can get work done. Also, I have told Mycroft not to let you leave the country.

Sherlock: …Fine. Eta 20.


	17. 2010, July

{Interoffice Memo: Dr. Granger, Do you have plans for luncheon today? -MH}

{Mr. Holmes, No. Why? -HG}

{Dr. Granger, Would you care to join myself and Mr. Watson for lunch at Fratelli's? –MH}

{Mr. Holmes, I would be delighted. Has Mr. Watson already agreed to join us as well? –HG}

{Dr. Granger, I thought we might surprise him. –MH}

{Mr. Holmes, Will the younger Mr. Holmes be invited to join us? Or is this more of a social visit? –HG}

{Dr. Granger, The latter. Anthea will pull the car around at 11:30. –MH}

Hermione met the car promptly at the kerb. Anthea never liked to be kept waiting. She needn't have bothered, however, as Mycroft took a full five minutes longer to make his way out of the building. As soon as he settled his large form into his seat, Hermione inquired, "Why are we kidnapping John Watson for lunch?"

"Who said anything about kidnapping, Hermione?"

"Semantics," Hermione said drily. Anthea smirked.

"I simply thought it was time to meet my brother's new friend in a more… social atmosphere."

"And you wanted me to come along because…?"

"Because he's already kidnapped John twice, and the man wouldn't trust the elder Mr. Holmes as far as he could throw him," Anthea explained.

"Indeed." Mycroft shot a _look_ at his PA. She raised an eyebrow at him in the mirror.

"Hmmm... Are you staying for lunch, at all, then?"

"No, but feel free to put it on the company card." And with that, the car pulled up outside the Diogenes club and Mycroft heaved himself free of it.

"Bastard," Hermione said as they pulled back into traffic.

"You _do_ know the car is bugged, Dr. Granger?" Anthea asked.

"Of course. He knows I think he's a manipulative swot, and Sherlock's a narcissistic twat. And yet I put up with them anyway," she said with a long-suffering sigh.

"Poor you." This particular girl called Anthea (a code name which had now been assigned to at least three assistants in a row) had been working for Mycroft for nearly four years. She was well aware of Hermione's relationship with the Holmeses. "This is him. Do me a favor and open the door, eh?"

Hermione scooted over and opened the door, right in front of a blond man walking too-near the kerb. He only just avoided walking into it.

"Oh, so sorry, wasn't looking where I was –"

Hermione cut him off. "John Watson, I presume?" John stared at her for a moment until she added, "Anthea's driving today. Come on, get in, or we'll miss the reservation."

The baffled-looking man did as directed. "Erm… what's going on this time? You didn't try to call me, did you?" he asked, fumbling for his phone.

Hermione took pity on the man. "No. We're going to lunch. This is Mycroft's way of trying to be friendly."

"Oh," a look of intense irritation crossed the man's face. "Is he going to be there? And, sorry, who are you?"

"No, he's paying for us, though, which is the friendly part. And I'm Hermione Granger, Sherlock's friend and ex-flatmate."

"This is it," Anthea called, pulling up next to the restaurant. "Reservation's under Granger for twelve sharp. Call me when you want a pick-up. I'm free all afternoon."

"Lovely, thanks, Thea!"

Hermione dragged her cousin's flat-mate into the restaurant. They were seated quickly and Hermione removed three listening devices from the table before the waiter returned for their order. John looked astonished that Mycroft would do such a thing, and then somewhat rueful as he realized, _of course, it's Mycroft Holmes._

"Right. I'm fairly certain that I'm just supposed to be making friends with you, so do feel free to ask me anything," Hermione said with a mischievous grin. She liked getting to know people based on the questions they asked, and it was unlikely she would have to hide many things from John (aside from the obvious), seeing as he did live with Sherlock. And, of course, she could indulge in her favorite hobby of leveling the playing field a bit between Sherlock and their mutual acquaintances. It always tweaked him when they showed up knowing things about him that he hadn't told him.

"Have you known the Holmeses long, then?" John asked, as she drowned a fourth tiny microphone in her water-glass.

"Oh, ages. I lived with Sherlock while I was doing my PsyD. 2002 to just last October."

"You're a psychiatrist?" John suddenly seemed guarded.

"Psychologist. Theoretically, anyway. No luck finding a job that uses the degree, unfortunately."

"So what do you do, then?"

"Bit of this and that… in the same way that Mycroft's a minor government official." She winked at him.

"Oh, right!" John winked back. Sherlock had obviously clued him in on that little "secret." "Gotcha. Why did you move out, if you don't mind my asking? I mean, I can see how it'd be a bit ironic, Sherlock living with a licensed psychologist, but…"

"Oh, no, it's fine. And it was nothing to do with that, though I have to say, he thought it was terribly ironic, too. Well, after he finally gave up on talking me into forensic pathology instead. No, I had a baby in March, and we decided last September, well, really, I decided, that Sherlock's lifestyle isn't really conducive to having a child 'round the house."

John laughed at her matter of fact tone. "Yeah, I can see that. Mrs. Hudson's never mentioned you."

"Well, I only met her twice, that dreadful business with her husband's cartel, you know. I don't even think she knows my name. We lived a bit north of Baker Street," she explained. "The Holmeses owned a flat there, but Mycroft sold it out from under Sherlock in November because he was acting like a spoilt brat after I left. Sherlock's only been living at your place since December."

"I see… He'd said he was looking to split the rent. I thought it was a new lease."

"Well, his allowance is more than enough to afford it alone, but he doesn't really do well in isolation, prefers an audience, you know? And if you split, he has more money for chemicals and such… I'm glad you two are getting along so well."

"Well I'm glad to finally meet my flatmate's girlfriend," the older man declared.

Hermione snorted into her napkin. "Good try, but no, I'm his cousin. Miranda's father left when I decided to keep her."

"Damn it," John didn't look too terribly embarrassed for his false assumption. "Sorry, it's just you said you were a friend, and you lived with him for years, and then had a baby…"

"It's fine, really. Happens all the time. With all my male friends, not just Sherlock."

"Of course. Girls and boys can't be friends, obviously. But then again, apparently two blokes can't anymore either. I was just thinking maybe you'd start coming round and people would stop taking the two of us for lovers. Me and Holmes, I mean."

"There are worse people to be taken for lovers with. And he's certainly possessive enough to make it look like he's dating anyone he spends any degree of time with," Hermione nudged.

"Yeah, well, bet he never crashed your date to drag you off to be his crime-fighting sidekick," John said, a touch of resentment hiding under his joking tone.

"Well, never to go solve a crime. Sherlock doesn't like to share his toys with me." She quickly changed the subject as a suspicious look crossed John's face. "But yeah, he did used to pull that with me. Ruined about four dates before I finally got him to back off. Still miffed about Sarah?"

"You could say that. Wait, how?"

She deliberately misinterpreted the question. "I read your blog. Not even Sherlock could tell you your ex-girlfriend's name from three months ago just looking at you."

"I'm not certain Sherlock knew her name when I was dating her. He kept calling her Sandra around the flat."

"He knew. He does that with people he doesn't like or doesn't think are important. He also knows Greg Lestrade's first name, but he pretends he doesn't so he can insist that they're not friends."

"So he does have friends, then?"

"Oh, a fair few. Most of them he's met through his work, of course, and I'm not sure I count, as family. But there's you, obviously; me; Lestrade and Molly Hooper, though she doesn't think he thinks they're friends; a few people I've introduced him to from my previous life; Candi, who's a stripper at the Pussycat; Pierce and Kelly, who run a bunch of different 'businesses' down by the river; a bunch of guys I'd know by sight but not by name from his Homeless Network; and of course, can't forget Jim from IT."

"Jim from IT is not a friend," John hissed.

Hermione grinned. "But people don't really have arch-nemeses, do they? In normal people terminology, he's more a friend than anything else. Not the kind of friend you trust, granted, but the kind of friend who _gets_ you," she explained. "The one who you're always competing with, when you're miles away from everyone else. Well, for Sherlock, at least."

"Jim Moriarty is a fucking psychopath," John snapped.

"Yes, well, you've said the same about Sherlock, haven't you? And Sherlock's been known to say the same about me."

"That was before I met _Jim from IT_." The fury in John's voice was nearly palpable. "And got pulled into his stupid _game_."

"So what, now you don't think my cousin's mad, just because Jim's obviously playing the part of the villain in their little drama?" Hermione asked, and then redirected. "Sherlock still owes me fifty pounds over him."

John was distracted by the change of subject, though still angry. "What? Why?" he asked sharply.

"Because I bet after the third round that it was him."

"You knew? How? And why didn't you tell anyone?"

Hermione shrugged. "It was their game. I wasn't invited to play. I told Sherlock. And it was all in the blogs. Well, mostly Molly's. But he introduced himself on yours as well, and Molly mentioned the Jim-is-gay fiasco. It was obvious, if you consider the degree of showmanship involved. He wouldn't have staged all that without introducing himself. Bit of a showoff, really. Not unlike Sherlock. Besides, he was already missing by the time I had a chance to look through everything. That was the biggest clue, really. This is really good. Want to try some?" She nudged her plate across the table, but John shook his head.

"You talk about it like he does. Like Sherlock. I suppose you agree with him that it's better not to care about the victims?" John sounded ever so slightly betrayed.

Hermione smiled kindly at the older man. "I agree that caring gets in the way of trying to save people sometimes. Like when a surgeon has to amputate, for example. It would do you no good to flinch away from causing more pain. You learn to set those emotions aside, push them away for later, redirect…" Hermione watched that metaphor hit home. Well, it would, for an army doctor.

John shook his head. "Still, you said it yourself: Jim from IT _gets_ him."

"I didn't say that Sherlock _gets_ Jim, though, did I? It's part of the reason Sherlock finds Jim so interesting. Well, that and he presents a much more complex problem than the average criminal. Sherlock's not a psychopath, you know," she added.

"No, he's… what did he say? A high-functioning sociopath?"

Hermione laughed. "He wishes. And that term has no real, agreed-upon definition. I could analyze Sherlock for days, but the important thing is that he cares very much about humanity and people as an abstract, and about a very few people specifically. He acts as though he doesn't and tries his very best to walk all over everyone, just to set the bar low on their expectations of him, so he can do whatever he wants, but he really does care very much what certain people think of him. He was very worried about your reaction to the Glasgow bombing, you know."

"Yeah, I know. I figured it out… eventually."

"Well, it took him twenty-six months of living with me to accept that I wasn't one of Mycroft's minions in deep cover, and it took _me_ four years to cut through his sociopath act, so don't feel too terrible for taking a few weeks to realize he cares about you."

"How'd you figure it out?"

"What, that he's not actually as unfeeling as he pretends?" John nodded. "Hmmm… no, I don't think I can tell you the details. Let's just say I did something a long time ago, and when Sherlock found out, he found it morally abhorrent. He didn't speak to me for three days. It was awful."

"What did you _do_?" John looked fascinated.

"I'm legally obligated not to explain it, as is Sherlock. Ask a different question."

"Sorry, can't. I'm just hung up on the fact that there's something _Sherlock_ thinks is _wrong_." He grinned, as though this was the best joke he'd heard all day.

Hermione laughed. "There are several things Sherlock thinks are _wrong_. People who refuse to see the truth, when it's sitting right in front of them; destroying the potential for rational thought, whether through murder or brainwashing or severe mental trauma; caring about people you can't help, instead of people you can help; gaslighting, which is when you trick someone into disbelieving the their own memories; people taking things that are _his_ ; paternalistic older brothers looking out for him... I could go on, you know."

"Ha! Do you know, Mycroft kidnapped me and offered me money to spy on Sherlock, the day after I moved in with him?"

"Of course I know. You should have taken the money. It's not like he doesn't have your flat bugged anyway."

"That's what Sherlock said. That we could have split the fee."

"You have to learn to negotiate with Mycroft, or he'll take advantage of you horribly. It's what he does. But he's a softie when it comes to Sherlock. I managed to get him to cover seven years of tuition for just making sure the idiot didn't OD or starve himself to death."

"So he's always been…"

"Sherlock? Yeah. He's not as bad as he was, though. I largely broke him of trying to self-medicate when he's bored, at least, and when he's not high, he eats more regularly." She shrugged.

"Tell me your secrets, o wise one," John joked.

"Well, just don't let him get bored."

"But _how_? I'm not going to up and become a serial killer just because my flat mate's driving me mad."

Hermione laughed. "No, don't. He'd figure it out in about half a second. But it's not like all the big questions in the world have to deal with crime. We spent nearly three years debating the nature of the universe. He's got a pretty good grasp of quantum mechanics, you know, and he's a surprisingly willing teacher. Moral philosophy's always a good one, if you want to argue just for the sake of it. He likes to play Devil's Advocate. And of course, there are always more languages to learn. You were in Afghanistan, right? Get him to practice your Arabic with you."

"How do you know I speak Arabic?"

Hermione smiled mysteriously. "I'm not Sherlock. I don't enjoy explaining myself quite so much as he does."

"Oh, come on."

"Fine. There are hints of it in the way you pronounce certain guttural consonants, which could admittedly alternatively be from learning Urdu or one several languages spoken in India later in life, but it's fair to say Arabic based on the statistical likelihood of a British citizen, especially an Army medic posted in Afghanistan, learning Arabic over any of the others… or I just stole Mycroft's file on you."

"You…" John started laughing, "You had me going there. So Mycroft's got a file?"

"Of _course_ Mycroft's got a file. He's got files on everyone. And I've got a copy. I'm fairly sure Sherlock has by now as well."

"So all this Science of Deduction stuff…?"

"Oh, besides the fact that it's an incredibly irritating misnomer, it's perfectly reasonable… until he runs into an issue of equifinality – you know, that more than one explanation is equally likely to explain all the facts – or until he misses a detail, or the actual explanation is significantly less likely than another that explains all the facts. I will admit, given their history, for example, that when I showed up in Sherlock's kitchen, it was far more likely I was one of Mycroft's minions than a cousin they hadn't spoken to in twenty years. Which doesn't mean that Sherlock didn't spend two years trying to prove a wrong assumption. I will tell you he'd consider it cheating to just look in the file to get bits to impress you, and anything he deduced before Mycroft kidnapped you was definitely a deduction. Mycroft wouldn't have bothered with the file until he decided you were likely to stick around."

"But can you do it, though? I mean, is it just a Sherlock thing? Or were you making up that bit about the accent and Urdu and Arabic and statistics?"

"No, it's not just a Sherlock thing. It's a game he and Mycroft used to play as children. And that was true. If I were really _paying attention_ , and actually cared to know that kind of thing, I could have told you that you spoke Arabic based only on the balance of probability and the conversation up to that point. It's generally easier to just get information by asking, but Sherlock hates admitting that he doesn't know any given thing, so he relies on the little clues much more than Mycroft. He'd just have you followed for a week and pull your service record."

"Show me?" John asked, presumably thinking that perhaps he would be better able to follow the observations of someone other than Sherlock. Patently absurd idea. Sherlock loved explaining how he knew things. It didn't get any clearer than that.

"You really don't want me reading you."

"No, I do."

"Sherlock reads _events_. I read _people_. There's a difference. You thought Sherlock was brilliant. You're just going to think I'm creepy. Possibly scary."

"Please?"

Hermione sighed. "Fine." She focused on her victim, calling to mind everything she knew about him, and dismissing Mycroft's file, because that was cheating. "Normal, Sherlock-style inference first: Just from the physical clues, I can say that you had a limp for about a year until about five and a half, six months ago, that was either psychosomatic, or post-surgical, since the limp itself is gone, now, but your stride and the way you hold yourself hasn't fully recovered from the irregular muscle-development during that time. Going further, now I've said that, I could tell you it was diagnosed as psychosomatic and by Sherlock because you made that little 'fucking-Sherlock' grimace that you also made when we were talking about his possessiveness and his game with Jim when I said 'psychosomatic' and because it disappeared right around the time you met him. You weren't going to the gym or physical therapy to correct it or compensate when you had the limp, which I know because of that flash of guilt when I said you'd developed some irregular muscle patterning. You know you ought to have compensated because you're a doctor, hence the guilt. Based on that I'd revise my estimate to having the limp for maybe only two or three months, which makes it likely to have been related to the reason you left the army, as that would be about the same time frame, yes? The tensing of your shoulders says yes.

"Next level: Why would you have avoided something you obviously knew you ought to do, and which the army would have covered the bills for? Well, depression's a popular diagnosis, but PTSD would be more likely since you're a vet. _That_ look says you hate me a little bit, which means PTSD is what your therapist said, too? Yes. Thought so. Would that be Ella, the one who made you start your blog? Yes. You don't think much of her, which means you don't think you've got PTSD. Dreams? Flashbacks? Yeah, thought so. She was totally right. You know it stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? It's not just World War II style shell-shock, you know. PTSD can manifest as having become used to a high-stress environment and the associated difficulties in transitioning back to civilian life. Following Sherlock around playing vigilante isn't actually a board-approved therapy, but I suppose it's a much more interesting coping mechanism than getting drunk and trying to forget.

"Fine, fine, stop glaring at me, I'll change the subject. I could tell you that, like me, you had a rough childhood. It's most likely that you went into the army because your marks weren't good enough to get you into a normal medical program, but you're obviously intelligent, so that was probably because you were working or bullied or both. I say you went into the army for medicine and not the other way round because it's clear that no matter how much you appreciate adventure, you're in it, whether war, or medicine, or Sherlock's mad chases, to save people. _That_ look said you got addicted to the adrenaline rush while you were out in the field, and you're not sure if you're okay with it, but I stand by my assessment of the original reason you joined up. If you weren't in it for the people, you'd not be so upset about Sherlock's not caring about the dead… And of course your pension's not enough to keep you in new clothes, but your jumper's been well-mended at least three times, and that's the sort of skill you learn as a kid, from an overworked mum who hasn't the time to do the mending herself or money buy to her kids new clothes, not as a bachelor. And your accent says lower middle class.

"Let's see… what else… Smaller things, maybe? You're straight, but the look you gave the couple at your nine o'clock when they walked in says you've got good friends or family who aren't. It bothers you that people think you're with Sherlock, but more because you resent the fact that Sherlock has taken a central role in your life so quickly, making it nearly impossible for you to find a romantic partner, than because you don't approve of the lifestyle. Ah, and because you think it's none of their damn business. Despite the fact that you think Sherlock is insane, possibly dangerous, and hopelessly clingy, you admire him. That's evident by the fact that you are trying to learn his methods, which is why you deduced that I was his girlfriend, and asked if it was real, and if I could give you a demonstration and explanation, and, of course, the fact that I've largely let you direct the conversation, and it's mostly been about him. Which is fine, honestly, I don't mind. I like telling people things he won't tell them about himself.

"The options you _didn't_ take in our conversation say almost as much as your words themselves: I brought up my daughter twice, and you didn't ask about her either time, which suggests that you haven't spent much time around women since you entered the army, and also that you don't want kids… though you clearly aren't opposed to them. My guess you've not really given the issue much thought, which in turn suggests that you haven't had a long-term relationship since your late teens, early twenties. The fact that you didn't ask me what I thought about Sherlock's mental health after I told you he's not a psychopath suggests that you don't really want to know. You find him fascinating, and would rather not ruin it with an actual psychologist telling you he's _actually_ crazy and unsafe to hang around. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but he is, on both counts. On the other hand, I'm a big believer in letting people make their own choices, so just mind you watch your back when you're in the field. Oh, and speaking of psychopaths, I know who shot the cabbie! Because you just flinched, and your second expression after surprise wasn't confusion, it was fear. And because that's your problem with psychopathic behavior. We hate that which we fear in ourselves. Don't worry. I'm not going to tell. It's not like there's any evidence, anyway. And of course, it's patently obvious that you're not a psychopath. Nobody fakes microexpressions that well, even me.

"So. I think that's about five minutes. How did I do?"

John was staring. He blinked twice and then said, "Well, you were right half right: that was absolutely terrifying. And brilliant, though, not or. You've got to be hell to play poker with."

Hermione laughed. "I like you. I can see why Sherlock likes you. And I wouldn't know. Never played."

…

John returned home after an extended luncheon to find his flat-mate lying on their sofa, tossing a ball into the air and catching it repeatedly.

"I met your cousin today," he said by way of greeting.

"Which cousin?" Sherlock asked, as though he didn't know.

"Hermione Granger."

Sherlock caught the ball and sat up, fiddling with his phone instead. "Mycroft has decided that it's time for you two to become friends, then. I suppose it was only a matter of time." John gave Sherlock a questioning look. "He meddles in my life far more than she does. If the two of you were introduced, it was Mycroft's doing not Hermione's."

"I actually knew that. He sent his car. What _is_ it with your family and weird names?"

"Hermione's from Shakespeare. Aunt Emma was a fan," Sherlock explained. "No one knows how father came up with Mycroft or Sherlock. He's never said. Mummy, and Uncle Dan, too, actually, insisted on at least one normal name – Hermione's middle name is Jean – but none of us use them."

John goggled. His question was meant to be rhetorical. He had hardly expected Sherlock to explain anything about his family. He never mentioned them if he could help it.

"Oh, do shut your mouth, John. I happen to like Hermione."

"So is she always…?"

"An excellent conversationalist? Slightly terrifying? Vaguely mysterious?"

"Yes."

"Yes."

"Do you have her number?"

"Of course."

"Could you _give_ it to me?"

"What on earth for?"

"I want to ask her out."

Sherlock sighed and John's phone beeped to signal the arrival of a text. "If you must."

"What is _that_ supposed to mean? I thought you liked her."

"I do. But it's not going to work out, I guarantee it."

"What, are you going to sabotage her like Sarah and Marcie?"

"Of course not. I would never do such a thing," Sherlock faked looking offended before he continued: "She and I have an arrangement. I don't interrupt her dates, and she lets me continue to breathe. You're just not her type."

John was almost distracted by the idea that Sherlock could actually be threatened into respecting anyone's privacy, but not quite. "What do you mean I'm not her _type_? What is her type? What do you even know about people having types?"

Sherlock answered the second question. "She goes for men like herself. Devious and brilliant. And while you are certainly more tolerable than the vast majority of the population, I regret to inform you that you simply are not in her league, in either brilliance or deviousness."

"I'm still going to ask her."

Sherlock waved a dismissive hand at him and went back to tossing his ball at the ceiling. "Whatever."

…

Hermione: Stop playing matchmaker

Mycroft: Matchmaker? You must be mistaken.

Hermione: Knock it off or I'll tell your mother

Mycroft: It was her idea

Hermione: Watson's not even my type

Mycroft: Men who fit into the family at all are hard to come by.

Hermione: So you thought you'd try to set me up with Sherlock's sidekick? No. Drop it.

Mycroft: Mummy worries about you, Jeanie.

Hermione: Fuck off.

Mycroft: She said something last time about poor Miri growing up without a father-figure.

Hermione: I am finally beginning to see why Sherlock finds you so irritating.

Mycroft: I'm just the messenger

Hermione: Sure, like you're just a minor official. Meddling arse.


	18. 2010, September

Hermione contained the flames around her giggling daughter's crib with a sigh and picked up the phone, dialing Mycroft's number.

A familiar female voice answered. "Mycroft Holmes' office. Who may I say is calling?"

"Hello, Anthea. It's Hermione. Could you just put me through? I'll wait if he's on the line."

"Sure thing, love."

The phone rang a few more times before Mycroft answered, but at least she didn't have to wait. "Hermione?"

"Hello, Mycroft. I am going to have to move again quite soon, I think, after which time I will no longer be able to work from home. Is that offer of an office still on the table?"

"Of course. May I ask why the sudden shift in plans?"

Hermione hesitated for a moment, then asked, "What do you know about the Thirteenth Ministerial Department?"

There were only twenty-five official Ministerial departments, numbered (or rather, lettered), in a certain official document, from one to twelve, and fourteen to twenty-six. When questioned, this discrepancy was generally explained as a relic of history, some sort of Ministry of Colonies which had been decommissioned or some such. That was a lie. The Thirteenth Ministerial Department was the Ministry of Magic.

There was a certain degree of surprise in Mycroft's voice as he responded. "Department M? Well, I suppose that would explain… quite a lot."

"It would, wouldn't it? We should talk in person."

"Indeed. I shall send the car."

…

Hermione: John's blog says that Sherlock was at Buckingham Palace dressed only in a sheet. Please tell me you got a photo.

Mycroft: Even better. [video attached]

Hermione: I love you.

Mycroft: Don't mention it.

Mycroft: To Sherlock.

Mycroft: The video. Not your sudden admission of familial affection. Feel free to rub that in.

Hermione: Why bother? Harry's still my favorite not-quite-brother.

Mycroft: You wound me, cruel cousin.

…

Hermione: John says you're getting texts from a woman?

Sherlock: Obviously…

Hermione: A woman who's not me, smartarse.

Sherlock: I really need to have a talk with him about what he puts on that damn blog.

Hermione: He says, and I quote, that she's really got to you.

Sherlock: She keeps asking me to dinner.

Hermione: Are you going to go?

Sherlock: No, she is irritating.

Hermione: Tell me about her.

Sherlock: We have to meet in person. Mycroft insists.

Hermione: You find her irritating and she's a threat to national security? What's her number?

Sherlock: You are not allowed to become friends with Irene Adler.

Sherlock: The world would not survive the pair of you.

Hermione: Is that why you won't go to dinner with her?

Sherlock: I don't date

Hermione: I do. Give me her number.

Sherlock: I don't think she's your type.

Hermione: What do you know about my type?

Sherlock: It doesn't include professional dominatrices?

Hermione: What on earth would make you think that?

Hermione: We've never talked about what I like in bed, thankyouverymuch

Hermione: I have no objections to a domme, so long as she's clever and a little bit evil

Hermione: I suppose I could just ask Mycroft for her number. He'd give it to me to spite you.

Sherlock: Angelo's, half an hour.

Hermione: Make it an hour. You _know_ I live forty-five minutes from Angelo's

Sherlock: Whatever


	19. 2010, December

"So you're back in Magical Britain, then?" George asked, throwing himself onto Hermione's sofa with his twin.

"Well, I'm not sure I ever really _left_. I've been in touch, you know, and I never really stopped using magic. But this place has proper wards to stop the little tempest from burning it down around our ears, and I expect I'll be paying a bit more attention to the politics and so on now."

"Yes, and _now_ ," Fred added, "Little Miri will be growing up with the little Potters and all her glorious adopted uncles," "Instead of living some awful, boring, mundane life out in muggle London," George finished.

"Honestly, you make it sound like I was planning to deprive you of her company."

"Well, we know you prefer to keep your lives separate." "If it turned out Miri was a squib," "You'd probably never have told her about magic at all."

That was true enough. "No reason to raise a child to magic, only to find they haven't the talent for it," she pointed out.

"Hermione, love," "Don't be daft." "As if any child of yours," "Could ever _not_ be magical."

"Oh, shut up."

"You know," "You love us!"

…

Three people in dark coats stood in a hallway outside the St. Bart's morgue. The eldest watched the younger man uneasily, and after a moment, offered a cigarette. The youngest, a woman, held his hand, and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. The younger man, the middle child of their trio, stared out the window, apparently trying to pretend that the sight of _that_ woman, lying on a slab, meant no more to him than any other.

"How did you know she was dead?" Mycroft asked.

"She had an item in her possession," Sherlock explained, still looking out the window, "An item which she said her life depended on. She chose to give it up."

"And where is this item now?"

Sherlock refused to answer. He caught sight of a grieving family through the window in the door at the end of the hallway. "Look at them. They all _care_ , so much. Do you ever wonder if there's something wrong with us?"

"All lives end," Mycroft pointed out. "All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock."

Hermione looked from her younger cousin to the elder, trying and failing miserably to hold her tongue. "It's not," she said in an acid-laced tone, mostly directed at the elder brother. "But that doesn't mean that _either_ of you have entirely managed to avoid it, does it, Mycroft?"

The men exchanged an uncomfortable look. Hermione smirked. "This is low tar," Sherlock complained.

"Well, you barely knew her," Mycroft replied blithely. The moment passed as all three of the cousins hid inappropriate grins.

"There's nothing wrong with you," Hermione said in an undertone as Sherlock pulled her away, throwing a 'Merry Christmas' over his shoulder at his brother. "The jury is still out on Mycroft."

Sherlock grinned at his cousin. "That's why you're my favorite family member. So. Five pounds says she's not dead, really."

"No bet. But you'd better be prepared to pretend that she is."

They flagged down a cab, and Hermione silently cast an anti-eavesdropping charm around them.

After a nod from Hermione, Sherlock continued their conversation.

"You know more than you're telling me, Hermione."

"But not more than you know, I'm sure. I know that rigor had set in for that body, so it's been at least two hours since death, and it's only been an hour since you got that text and found the phone. If Miss Adler had anyone she trusted to send you a text after she died, she would have just given _them_ the phone. I know that if she was actually in danger of dying, she would have hidden or destroyed the phone, not had it sent over to you as a Christmas gift. Putting her 'life' in your hands? If that's not symbolic, I don't know what is, and even Irene Adler wouldn't bother flirting with you after she was supposedly dead. And I know you're not likely to figure out the game she's playing unless you play along. I _think_ that Mycroft knows more than _he's_ saying, but, well…"

"Yes, it is Mycroft. There's no guarantee it's relevant."

"Pretty much. And of course, on a completely unrelated note, I have my suspicions that Jim from IT is plotting again, something to do with Mycroft this time."

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at his cousin. "Jim Moriarty is always plotting, and Mycroft is involved in everything."

"Don't give me that look. I'm not playing. I told you and Jim both that I'm a spectator, and I plan to _remain_ a spectator, even if it involves Mycroft and not you. Unless you're planning to hijack the game and mess with Moriarty's actual business, you'd probably do better to pretend I didn't mention that, either."

"You think Adler's one of his agents?"

"Don't you?" Sherlock nodded reluctantly. "Doesn't mean she doesn't actually like you, though. I mean, she does want to take you to dinner, after all."

"Shut up. So, we're playing along?"

"Well, I generally do. And if nothing else, it will piss off Mycroft if he loses and you appear to have been instrumental to his loss."

"True. I just hate people fussing over me."

"Well, channel that into vague irritation that they've been searching your flat for drugs."

"They better not have messed up my sock index again."

"They almost certainly have."

"Of course they will have. That settles it, then."

"You're going to deliberately play into Jim's trap because your brother had your flat mate and your landlady mess up your socks?"

"Well, I'll pretend to be in mourning and play along with Irene, at least."

"Ooh, _Irene_ , is it?"

"Shut up. Try to look appropriately sad or something."

"She was your girlfriend."

"She was not my girlfriend. We never even had dinner."

"Whatever."

"That's my line!"

"Look sad or something." Sherlock made a face. "That's terrible. You really suck at this whole acting thing."

"I am an excellent actor." Sherlock rearranged his face to look more stunned, as though he was in shock.

"Jackass."

"Psychopath."

"Get out of the cab."


	20. 2011, January

Sherlock: I need your help.

Hermione: With what?

Sherlock: I'll tell you about it in person.

…

"So you've managed to track her down, but so has this terrorist cell, and they're going to execute her in Karachi if their demands aren't met in seventy-two hours?"

"Sixty-nine and a half, now."

"So what do you want to do?"

"Fake her death, obviously. Get her out of the game."

"You know you won't be able to see her for years. At least until Moriarty is resolved."

"I can't let them just _kill_ her, Hermione. It would be like killing the last Amur Leopard."

Sherlock waited for several minutes while Hermione thought. They walked around the frozen park in silence.

"Are you going to help me or not?"

"Of course I am. How good a fake death are we talking, here?"

"Good enough to fool Mycroft. He's going to want absolute proof that she's dead."

"So, video cameras, and a body that can stand up to forensic analysis?" Hermione tapped one finger against her lips.

"If you can swing it."

"Oh, I can swing it. I told you I'd spent a lot of time considering how I _ought_ to have disappeared my parents, didn't I?"

"I do recall something of the sort."

"We're going to need a sample of her hair or blood, an animal with approximately the same body mass as the target, and an invisibility cloak."

"Invisibility cloak?"

"Yes," Hermione said firmly. "If you get the first two, I'll talk to Harry about the last. Meet you at my place in three hours."


	21. 2011, March

Sherlock Holmes really shouldn't have been able to access Hermione and Miranda's new flat, especially without magical assistance – the only entrance was through Diagon Alley, or the floo or other means of magical transport, but Hermione had long since given up any expectations she might ever have held for her cousin to conform to such petty inconveniences as muggle-repelling charms. If she knew Sherlock (and she did, unfortunately well), he had most likely followed her to the Leakey one day, noticed that there was a gap in his perceptions, and single-mindedly attacked the blind-spot until he managed to overcome the avoidance charms and actually enter the pub. After that, it would have been easy enough to wait for someone to open the archway to the Alley and lurk until he spotted her, trail her to her flat, and break in while she was at work. His blood would get him through the wards, and his lockpicks through the door.

Either that, or someone was impersonating him, and had thus far simply half-destroyed her kitchen (apparently in order to make tea,) and was lounging in her favorite armchair reading her latest acquisition on magical theory.

Hermione had dropped her bag of groceries on realizing the state of the kitchen, and set her daughter to floating in a bubble of shield charms which would stop anything short of an Unforgivable before proceeding into the flat, wand at the ready.

Sherlock, on seeing his baby cousin wearing her warrior face, as he privately thought of it, tried to diffuse the situation. "Tisk, tisk," he teased the guarded witch, "Security so poor a _muggle_ could break in? Granger, I'm ashamed of you."

"Prove you're Sherlock," Hermione demanded, not rising to the bait.

Sherlock sighed. "The first time I met you I told you to prove you weren't one of Mycroft's minions, and you said you didn't know that you really could because we didn't share any secrets. You proceeded to relate your experience of the only previous occasion on which we had encountered one another, and I thought you were lying because of the discrepancy between your age were your story true and your apparent age at that time. Said discrepancy was not explained for nearly seven years. I still cannot believe you managed to lie to me that long. Stop pointing your bloody wand at me. I've got news."

Hermione did, in fact, drop her wand, releasing her young daughter from her protections and collapsing onto the sofa. The babbling infant crawled to her favorite uncle, who magnanimously allowed her to join him in his armchair.

"And you couldn't have texted me first? I've been outside, so it's not like I wouldn't have gotten it," the witch groused.

"Where's the fun in that?"

Hermione gave Sherlock her least-amused look. "You're lucky I didn't hex first and ask questions later. What's your news, and why did you feel the need to break into my flat?"

"Mycroft bought it, and aside from it being safer for all parties to tell you that in person, where my least favorite sibling can't overhear, I was bored."

Hermione rolled her eyes at that. Of course he was. "So we're in the clear, then?"

"Yes. Most ironically, brother dearest has decided to try to spare my poor feelings over my lost love, and has built a cover story which involves Miss Adler entering the Witness Protection Program in the States and going off the grid."

Sherlock was barely containing his sniggers, but Hermione looked concerned. "And you're sure that he has no idea? I mean, it is a bit _too_ ironic, isn't it, that he would fake exactly what we actually did?"

"Oh, no, I'm certain he didn't. He wouldn't even outright tell John, though he passed over her old phone to John to give to me. Symbolic, and all that. John thinks I'm wandering the streets in mourning, now. I could barely keep a straight face all morning."

Hermione finally joined Sherlock in his enjoyment of the situation, grinning broadly. "Well, then, congratulations to us!"

"What've you done?" a Weasley twin asked, letting himself into the apartment. "Wotcher, Holmes. Freddy's going to be late for dinner, firecracker. Bit of an accident at the shop, and he drew the short straw to clean up."

"Hello, Weasley," Sherlock greeted the intruder. "I thought you were Fred." The differences between the two men were subtle, but he was almost certain that this was the one who more often introduced himself as Fred.

"Only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and every-other Saturday," was the nonsensical answer.

"Hi, George!" Hermione called from the sofa, not bothering to stand. "Illegal and dangerous things, of course."

The red-headed man pouted at his sometime-girlfriend. "So you'll do illegal and dangerous things with Sherly, here, but not with us? I'm hurt." He flopped down on the sofa as well, and Hermione put her feet in his lap. Miranda waved sleepily at the man from Sherlock's arms. "Wotcher, Miri."

"Don't be jealous," Hermione said, just as Sherlock responded, "Only on Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday afternoons."

'George' laughed aloud. "Good to see you, mate. You should come over more often. Staying for dinner?"

Sherlock shook his head. "I'm emotionally compromised at the moment," he deadpanned. "If I don't go back to Baker Street, John will doubtless run tattling to Mycroft, and then all this sneaking about will be for nothing."

"Does this have something to do with that Adler bird?"

"Yes, apparently she's dead. The Queen's men confirmed it just this morning. I'm terribly heartbroken over the whole thing."

"Hmmm… why do I suspect that appearances may be deceiving in this case?" 'George' asked, eyes twinkling with suppressed laughter.

"Probably because you've known me for years, and Hermione longer," Sherlock offered, maintaining his former solemnity. "Though I assure you, they are not."

"Oh, yes, you look absolutely crushed."

"Our Sherlock keeps his emotions close to the chest, he does," Hermione said, suppressing a smirk.

'George' rolled his eyes. "Fine, stick to your story. We'll get it out of you eventually."

"No, you won't," Hermione protested.

"You're a terrible liar, love." The man patted her condescendingly on the knee.

Sherlock grinned openly at him. "That's just what she wants you to think."

"And we want her to think she's succeeding," 'George' stage-whispered.

"Prat," the woman in question accused, attempting to kick the man sharing her sofa, but she was smiling.

"And with that, I do believe I'll be off," Sherlock said jauntily. "If one of you would care to remove the sleeping child...? Thank you," he added, as 'George' levitated the girl to her mother's lap. "Ta for now, Granger, Fred."

"Try to look sad!" Hermione called after him, nearly obscuring the Weasley's quiet, "How _does_ he do that?"

"It's Tuesday!" he called back. It wasn't, but Fred's laughter followed him out of the flat. Sherlock grinned. He did so love messing with the prankster twins. They could almost keep up, which made it more fun.

…

John: Hermione, Sherlock is driving me mad.

Hermione: What do you want me to do about it?

John: Sympathize with me? Kill him for me? Invite me to dinner so I can get away from him?

Hermione: Poor you. No, I couldn't. I don't murder people I like.

Hermione: And sorry, dear, I'm seeing someone now.

John: Use your mystical psychologist powers to make him act sane for once in his life?

Hermione: He often /acts/ sane…

John: He came home covered in blood with a harpoon begging for a fag and is driving me up a wall. Help.

Hermione: You were the one who told him you'd support his going cold turkey. Stick a bloody nicotine patch on his face if he bothers you so much.

John: Now he is insisting we go to Dartmoor this afternoon. To investigate a 20 year old cold case and a giant dog.

Hermione: Have fun, and don't do anything I wouldn't do.

John: Too late. I'm already living with your crazy cousin. Who are you seeing?

Hermione: Someone I've been off and on with since school. You haven't met him.

…

Sherlock: Hermione

Sherlock: This is important, answer your phone

Sherlock: /Code M/ important, Granger.

"Sorry, Sherlock," Hermione finally responded to Sherlock's texts, hours later. It was probably a sign of how urgent his problem was that he had actually answered her call. "I was at home – no service. I've just popped out to the store. What's up?"

"Take the next day, no two days and come out to Dartmoor. I've a client who might be more your sort of problem than mine."

"Sherlock…"

"Code _M_ , Hermione. Mycroft will let you off. You never take personal days. Get the Weasley boys to watch Miranda. I need you to look into this, at the very least."

Hermione sighed. Sherlock had only ever had two cases where he suspected the use of magic. He had been wrong both times, but insisted in both cases that magic was a more reasonable explanation than the actual series of events, which had, admittedly, involved extremely unlikely series of chance occurrences. She couldn't exactly refuse, though. "Fine. Text me your coordinates and I'll be there first thing tomorrow morning."

Sherlock rang off without another word, but several minutes later, proper apparition coordinates appeared in her inbox. He had to have worked them out ahead of time, which meant that he was more concerned than he sounded over the whole situation, whatever it was.

Hermione delivered Miranda with Ginny and Harry that same night, and extricated herself from their home only after promising Ginny (who seemed to be taking after her mother with her love of children) that she could arrange the little girl's first birthday party at the end of the month.

In the morning, she simply informed Mycroft that she had gone to investigate a potential Department M Incident. He was more than willing to let her go if it meant he wouldn't have to deal with the Ministry of Magic at the end of the week. Apparently his week was off to a tremendous start. Sherlock had already broken into a secure military compound using his name, and he wanted to avoid any more complications with this particular adventure. He must have been even more irritated than he let on, because he generally wasn't so forthcoming.

…

Hermione arrived in Sherlock's hotel room with a loud pop bright and early the next morning. Sherlock, sitting cross-legged on his still-made bed, raised an eyebrow at her.

"Shut up, it's early," she defended her louder and slightly-less-graceful-than-usual entrance.

"I didn't say a thing," he grinned.

"Bastard. Why am I here? You've obviously not slept, so I'm to take it it's a difficult one?"

The man sighed and gestured her toward the room's only chair. "Client is Henry Knight. Sunday night out on the moors, Dewer's Hollow, he claims to have encountered the footprints of an enormous hound. Came seeking my services on Monday on the first train, we arrived here Monday afternoon."

"And…?"

"And his father was torn apart in front of him by an enormous black hound with glowing red eyes, or so he claims, twenty years ago. Some bloke giving tours made a cast of the footprint, so at least that's confirmed. Looks like a Great Dane or Mastiff print."

"So what, you think you've got a barghest on the loose?" Hermione would not be impressed if she had gone to the trouble of getting the Potters to babysit if she was here as a glorified animal control officer. "Didn't you even consider the mundane explanation? It's probably just a normal dog's footprints now, even if it was a department M issue back then."

"Don't be daft, Granger. It's more interesting than that. He called it a _hound_. Odd word choice, that. It was enough to get me out here, anyway."

"Yes, but which part was enough to get _me_ out here?"

"The part where we went out to Dewer's Hollow to investigate last night. John spotted someone flashing Morris across a hill – UMQRA – may not be related. We heard a howl in the distance, all three of us. I turned in that direction with my torch and saw the beast growling at me from the top of the hollow. Impossibly large, glowing eyes. Matched that photo you've got for a Grim, but with the demon-eyes glowing. Knight saw it as well, though John says he didn't, and he was still up on the rim – it would have been closer to him. That's only part of it, though. I was _afraid_ , Hermione. Truly, genuinely, hands-shaking-afterward _frightened._ "

Hermione was not impressed. "You've called me out to Dartmoor because you spotted a Cu Sith and had a normal human reaction?"

" _No!_ I've called you to Dartmoor because I've come across something that's capable of inducing the kind of fear I've only _read about_ in its victims and apparently making them see a – Cu Sith, did you call it? – where no such thing exists! If it was there – really there – John would have seen it too! But he didn't! And it's driving me mad, not being able to trust my senses."

"Wait, what do you mean the kind of fear you've only read about?"

Sherlock shrugged, failing to feign nonchalance. "Hands shaking, cold washing over you, unable to think properly or move, frozen in indecision between fight and flight. Fear. Terror. It was present _before_ the hound appeared, and decidedly external in origin. I've _never_ felt like that before."

"So ignoring your claim of never having felt one of the basic human emotions before last night…"

"High-functioning sociopath."

Hermione ignored her snippy cousin. "It's not a Black Dog, then… Something that spreads an aura of fear before it, and has the same appearance to anyone who encounters it… Not a lethifold – they just look like animated shadows… Doesn't sound like any creature I'm familiar with… But there are potions that can do that. Nightmares of Lethe, the Fall of Pergamum, Asternax's Draught… The last one especially. It's a fear inducing hallucinogen that can be used to taint other substances. All it needs is skin contact, though it's more effective if it's taken internally. Takes longer to wear off. My best guess is that something you've eaten or drunk since you've arrived here was tainted."

Sherlock thought hard for a long moment. "The sugar. I take sugar in my coffee. John doesn't. It's the only thing we've had different. I'll test it today."

Hermione nodded. "And I should probably talk to your client. There are certain signs if someone's been under the influence of any of these potions for an extended period of time."

"Fine, fine." Sherlock waved his hand, dismissive of the client. "I'll need to steal some of his sugar, anyway. You can distract him while I take care of that."

"Where is John, anyway?"

"Off somewhere in a snit, or hungover, or possibly still in bed with the client's therapist. Not important. We'll find him later, I'm sure."

…

"Morning!" Sherlock barged into the client's house, loudly cheerful. Hermione rolled her eyes on the front step.

"Don't mind Holmes," she said reassuringly to the shocked client as Sherlock spun him around to look into his eyes.

"How are you feeling?" the detective questioned.

"I'm … I didn't sleep very well. I'm sorry, have we met?" he directed the last question toward Hermione.

"I'll make coffee!" Sherlock announced, helping himself to the kitchen as though he owned the place, leaving the others in the doorway.

Hermione rolled her eyes. She couldn't say her cousin wasn't effective, but his manners did leave something to be desired. "No, we haven't." She extended a hand. "Hermione Granger. How do you do?"

"How do you do? Look, what's going on?"

"Holmes has called me in as… a consultant, of sorts."

"What do you do?" The baffled man asked, ushering the pretty woman to a nearby sofa, and ignoring the difficult detective ransacking his kitchen.

"A bit of this and that, but I'm a psychologist by training," Hermione admitted.

"I'm not imagining it!" the client snapped. "He saw it too, even if he won't admit it!"

"Oh, he's admitted it. That's not in question. One of my hobbies is dog breeding. He's asked me to offer an opinion on the footprints, not your mental health," Hermione lied.

The client seemed mollified. "It's a massive hound," he explained. "At least as high as my shoulder, with red eyes."

Hermione, thankfully, was saved from having to make up anything about dogs by Sherlock's return. He was holding three mugs of what might have been, under certain circumstances, considered coffee. Hermione, uncertain whether Sherlock actually knew how to make even instant coffee, took hers rather reluctantly, and immediately set it on a side-table.

"Hound," the detective said, handing their host a mug. "Why do you call it a hound? Why a hound?"

"Why – what do you mean?"

"It's odd, isn't it? Strange choice of words – archaic. It's why I took the case… the footprints of a gigantic _hound_. Why say 'hound'?"

"I don't know! I…"

Sherlock finally took a sip of his own coffee, and set it aside. "Actually, we'd better skip the coffee. Come Granger!" He swept off imperiously, Hermione and the client trailing in his wake.

…

After the brief sugar-stealing mission, Hermione removed herself to London to have a closer look at the Ministry archives of Potions developments and her own not-insubstantial library of books on dark potions and creatures. She wished, not for the first time, that Severus Snape had survived the war – he would have been her first choice of a primary resource. Lacking a potions master with a lifetime of experience with dark magic behind him, she retreated into dusty tomes, emerging late in the afternoon confident in her initial assessment: a potion was far more likely to be responsible than any sort of creature, and of those, Asternax's Draught, or a derivative of it, was the most likely cause of Sherlock's reported symptoms.

A text was waiting for Hermione when she emerged from her wards, fully intending to check on her daughter before returning to Sherlock's case. Mycroft urgently requested that she stop his accursed nuisance of a brother running rampant through the halls of the Baskerville research facility. As the message had been sent a mere hour before, the witch decided with a sigh that Ginny was more than capable of contacting her if she was actually needed up in Hogsmeade, and that it was probably more important to stop Sherlock doing whatever he was doing than to apparate all the way up to Hogsmeade for an hour.

…

Much to Hermione's irritation, on arriving at Baskerville, she discovered that Sherlock had been, received a phone call, and gone, not five minutes prior. Mycroft had authorized her to access anything necessary to determine what his brother was up to and why, so she viewed the security tapes of his "experiment" with the sugar and inspected the lab itself and the computer files Sherlock had accessed before taking her own leave.

Her discoveries were alarming: Not only did a group of Grindelwaldean era wizards appear to have been playing at technomancy up until the late 1980s, integrating potions with biological warfare to create an aerosolized version of the fear draught, but they had clearly been skirting the edges of the Statute to do so. It seemed that HOUND was a research group, which suggested that the client had been poorly obliviated, which meant that someone was still working on the HOUND project. Most of the complex, of course, was unaware of the situation, but she would have to alert the ministry, and probably Mycroft, if anything was to be done without mass obliviations.

…

Several minutes later, having apparated back to town to look for her wayward cousin, Hermione was still trying to think of a way to contain the situation which would not involve acting as Mycroft's intermediary with the DMLE. It was always terribly awkward trying to translate the wizards' speech and mannerisms into something muggle friendly, which they were required to do, even though Mycroft obviously knew about Department M. Her cousin had, in fact, been pleased to have a known witch on his staff, because it meant he didn't have to deal with 'those bumbling idiots' anymore. They were always more awkward when trying to actively maintain the statute of secrecy, and most wizards didn't have the security clearance to know they could speak freely to Mycroft.

It was in this distracted state that Hermione quite literally ran into one of her favorite muggle law enforcement officers.

"Bloody hell, I'm so sorry. Got lost in my own thoughts and didn't see you there!" she apologized quickly, scrambling to her feet.

"Hermione?" the man asked, peering at the witch under her floppy hat. "Hermione Granger?"

Hermione pushed her ridiculous headgear (only slightly easier to handle than her still-untamable hair) out of her face. "Oh, hello, Detective Inspector Lestrade. What brings you to the middle of nowhere?"

"I've told you, Hermione, call me Greg. Mycroft has arranged for my holiday to be extended. Seems to think you're going to need a legitimate and trustworthy official presence in the area in the next couple of days. You're here with Sherlock?"

"Sorry Greg. Force of habit. More like I'm here trailing after Sherlock and trying to make sure he doesn't get into too much trouble. Seen him lately?"

Lestrade laughed. "Got away from you, did he?"

"I was off doing a spot of research, and he went and broke into Baskerville _again_ , so Big Brother decided it would be a better use of my time to trail him around and if not actually clean up his messes, point out exactly what he's done to those who are supposed to know better than to let him in in the first place." Hermione rolled her eyes expressively.

"The saddest part is that all of that made sense. I've been around you lot too long, I think."

"Tell me about it. But have you seen him?"

"Yeah, ran into him and John 'round lunchtime. They dragged me off to investigate a vegetarian restaurant that'd been ordering a lot of meat. Turns out they had a dog, but it was put down a while ago. I slipped off just after two." The DI checked his watch. "I expect they're at dinner by now."

So in other words, he hadn't seen the boys since before they had run off to Baskerville. "That's a dangerous assumption around Sherlock," Hermione pointed out.

"Yes, well, you must have noticed John has a way of getting him to at least sit down at regular intervals. Is there any truth to that rumor…?"

"About John and Sherlock? No, not a bit of it. John's as straight as they come."

Lestrade smirked. "I notice you don't say anything about your dear cousin."

Hermione sniggered. "That would be telling. So how was your vacation? France?"

"The Riviera," the man nodded, and then sighed. "Things are a bit patchy with the wife. We, or, well, I guess _I_ was hoping this trip would help us get back on track, but, well…"

"Tough luck, mate. You've got my number, right, if you ever want to talk?"

"Yes, Hermione, my secretary's filed you with all the other psychologists."

Hermione pulled a face at his put-upon expression. He must have been getting a lot of offers of 'help' lately. "Don't be like that, Greg. In a completely non-official capacity, as a friend, I'm here if you want a woman's opinion or whatever. Text me, though, and we'll meet somewhere, the phone service at my flat's awful."

"Thanks, dove."

"No problem at all. Anyway, I ought to get moving, before Sherlock drags John out onto the moors. Then I'd never catch them up."

Greg chuckled. "Right then. See you around."

The DI turned away with a wave, but before they had walked more than a few steps in opposite directions, his phone rang.

"Lestrade. Holmes? Hello? What's that, then? The hollow? Dewer's? Why – Sherlock!" He looked around in confusion for a second. Sherlock had obviously hung up on him. "Hey, Granger!" he called to the woman, who had already stopped, eavesdropping as soon as she heard the name 'Holmes.' "Come on, your arsehole cousin wants me out on the moors. Does Dewer's Hollow mean anything to you?"

"It's the scene of the crime. Let's go." Hermione would say she was resigned to participating in yet another of her cousin's mad adventures, but there was a reason she had stuck around, first with Harry, and then with Sherlock. She had missed the thrill of adventure since Miranda was born.

...

Hermione and Greg arrived on the scene just in time to see John take a pistol from the client. Greg scrambled down into the hollow, while Hermione kept watch on the rim.

"But we saw it: the hound, last night. We s… we, we, we _did_ , we saw…" the poor man babbled.

Sherlock tried to calm him. "There was a dog, Henry, leaving footprints, scaring witnesses, but it was nothing more than an ordinary dog. We both saw it – saw it as our drugged minds wanted us to see it. Fear and stimulus, that's how it works." The client did not seem reassured. "There was never any monster," the detective added, just in time to be proven wrong by the howl of a beastly dog.

…

The men in the fog-filled hollow were clearly hallucinating. A fifth figure had joined them, wearing a mask and approaching Sherlock. Suddenly, Sherlock headbutted the new figure, knocking his gas mask free. He slapped a hand to his mouth and nose.

"It's in the fog!" Hermione shouted. She doubted the hallucinating men heard her. She didn't dare use magic on any of the maddened men directly, lest they see her unknown power as a threat and attack her. She could, of course, subdue them all, but she hesitated to do so, as she didn't really want to cause any of them long-term damage or distract them from the real threat: The dog was slinking down into the hollow from the other side, probably driven insane by the potion, just as the men were.

She could, on the other hand, do something about the potion-infused fog they were currently breathing in. A quick _ventus_ charm began to clear the air, sending a fresh breeze into the hollow. Even Sherlock, in his potion-addled state, wouldn't think to wonder where the so-convenient wind had come from.

Greg and John, still armed, turned their pistols on the animal, and the fog dissipated as Sherlock forced the client to recognize that it _was_ just a dog. Hermione joined them as her cousin explained gleefully that the hollow itself was the scene of the crime and the murder weapon all in one.

And then the dog whined, trying to drag itself to its feet.

The man Sherlock had headbutted – Frankland, Hermione thought his name was – took the opportunity of the distraction to escape. Sherlock, Lestrade, and John took chase, following Frankland toward a minefield.

Hermione, meanwhile, brought the client back to Lestrade's car, taking advantage of their momentary privacy to examine his memory and the state of the charms he had been subjected to many years before.

Sherlock's (and Henry's therapist's) conclusion that the man had been recalling repressed memories of an attack by a man (not a hound) on his father was essentially correct, though the memories had not been suppressed due to trauma, but due to Frankland's desire to hide his illegal activities. The memory charms had begun to deteriorate under the pressure of repeated exposure to the weaponized potion and its similarity to the conditions under which the initial memory had been altered.

After a short internal debate, Hermione stabilized the man's mind, using the explanation Sherlock had invented in the hollow. It was, after all, more or less correct, lacking only the details that the drug was actually a potion; Frankland was actually a wizard; and that the memory was initially lost due to a spell. The Ministry obliviators could hardly be expected to come up with anything better.

By the time the men returned to the cars, reporting in various tones of resignation and irritation that Frankland had blown himself up, Henry was convinced that Sherlock had been right about everything. Hermione pulled Sherlock aside for a moment to explain the three details left out, and, after promising to fill him in more thoroughly at a later date, apparated from his hotel room to her flat.

…

Hermione looked longingly at her bedroom door for a moment before turning to the kitchen – Sherlock's case was just wrapping up, but Mycroft would want a full report, and then she would have to deal with the Ministry and the issue of decommissioning the HOUND project – for she had no doubt it was a holdover from the Ministry war programs developed in the 1940s – and removing all traces of magical presence from the Baskerville compound. Coffee would be necessary.

…

A text woke Hermione, who had fallen asleep on the sofa in her office sometime around eleven on Wednesday morning, governmental officials (finally) more or less appeased by her (judiciously edited) reports.

John: Are you sure you want me to keep your name out of the story?

Hermione: Write it so I wasn't even there. It's easy enough.

John: Well, if you're sure.

Hermione: I hardly did anything, anyway, John, and it's better if no one knows anyone from Mycroft's office was involved, even if I wasn't there officially.

John: All right, I'll let you know when it's up.

Hermione: Thanks, John.

Hermione rolled over and went back to sleep – it had been a very _long_ two days, and she still needed to go fetch Miranda in the afternoon.

...

Hermione: Thought you should know, they caught Frankland today. Real name: Pierce Selwyn. He's been sentenced to a life term for his various crimes, and if they were willing to acknowledge you at all, Harry's department would extend their thanks to you for alerting them to the situation.

Sherlock: I told you it was a code M.

Hermione: I never said it wasn't!

Sherlock: We all know you were thinking it. Did you have fun?

Hermione: A bit. I'm still not coming back to the front lines. But if you need me, I'll be there. You always knew I would be.

Sherlock: Yes, and that's why you're my favorite.

Hermione: Because I'm dependable like that?

Sherlock: Unlike some family members I could name.

Hermione: He warned you after Baskerville that if you ever used his name to break into secure governmental facilities again, he wouldn't be helping you out. Last weekend was fully on your own head.

Sherlock: Fine. Take his side.

Hermione: I'm on my own side, thanksverymuch. Don't forget, Miri's party is at the Potters' this Saturday. Come by around 10 and we'll head up together.

Sherlock: Fine, fine. I'll let you know when I come up with the cover for John.

Hermione: Just tell him it's a family thing.

Sherlock: Where's the fun in that?


	22. 2011, May

Sherlock: Moriarty's back.

Hermione: I know.

Sherlock: There's going to be another game.

Hermione: I know.

Sherlock: Are you on my side?

Hermione: You know better than to ask that, Sherlock. I'm impartial.

…

Sherlock: They want me at his trial.

Sherlock: He's got to be up to something.

Hermione: Are you going to go?

Sherlock: How could I not?

Hermione: Holmes… be careful.

…

John: Why aren't you here?

Hermione: I had to work.

John: Sherlock's gotten himself arrested for harassing the jury.

Hermione: Tell him he's an idiot for me. He's winning no points by doing exactly what's expected of him.

John: You know something

Hermione: I know many things.

John: You know what's going on with Sherlock and Moriarty

Hermione: If I did, I couldn't tell you.

John: Hermione! People are going to get hurt!

Hermione: What would you have me do, John?

John: You're as smart as either of them. And sane.

Hermione: Flatterer

John: You could think of something if you wanted to.

Hermione: My hands are tied. If I had a long-term solution, I would have used it by now. The best thing, in terms of collateral damage, is to let them have their little game.

John: You're as bad as they are.

…

Sherlock: If you can get to my flat and hide yourself well, I'm expecting a visitor in the next five minutes or so.

Hermione stood, disillusioned and watching from a corner as her cousin and his 'good old-fashioned villain' took their tea. If the trial was the opening act, the overture, this was the first engagement. The witch wasn't sure if her cousin truly understood the arch-criminal's posturing and power play. As brilliant as he was, people weren't truly his strong suit. He always was more the Ravenclaw than the Slytherin. It was bound to bite him on the arse in this game, she was sure.

That business about Sherlock _proving_ that he knew what Jim was on about was fascinating. She couldn't help but feel the detective had come out behind by admitting his knowledge. On the other hand, a few lines of code to break into any computer system, anywhere? Rubbish. Hermione couldn't say she knew much about computers, but even she knew that was bloody stupid. Not even _alohomora_ could open _every_ lock. She certainly didn't think much of the "client list" if they did believe it. And Sherlock should know better, but he was playing along, hopefully drawing Moriarty to underestimate himself. So perhaps there was some hope for his side after all. And no matter what she could say via any communication which could be intercepted, she was on Sherlock's side. Clearly the game would be played on a deeper level than this…

Jim stalked out, leaving his threatening apple behind him. Sherlock smirked openly at it. A wave of Hermione's wand erected privacy charms. She double-checked that they were solidly in place before dropping her disillusionment.

"A most interesting opening move," she offered, taking the criminal's abandoned armchair.

"Indeed," Sherlock answered absently, most likely still running through the possible implications of his counterpart's actions.

"So you intend to follow his lead?"

"I shouldn't think I'll find out much of what he's planned if I don't. I could, of course, refuse – derail him entirely, but I don't think he'd respond well if I _don't_ play his game. Do you?"

"Well, no," Hermione admitted. "But I do think you ought to be careful. He's much better at manipulating public opinion and the systems of bureaucracy than I think you're really aware. And he wouldn't bait a trap for you if he didn't think it could hold you."

Sherlock sighed. "I've got an end-game in mind. A final solution to his final problem, as it were. Even if it doesn't result in a total victory, it should set me well ahead. It's a bit further-reaching than I believe he's thinking at the moment."

Hermione made a non-committal noise. "Is it something along the lines of how I spent 1998 and 1999?"

Sherlock's smile was completely devoid of emotion. "It might be."

"Will you need my help?"

"I wouldn't turn it away, though I doubt I should say as much to our resident impartial observer."

"You know I'm only sitting it out because you'd never forgive me if I were to meddle. It's not as though Jim from IT even knows who I am."

"How did you get him to let us go at the pool?"

Hermione smirked. "I simply called inquiring about whether he could acquire a certain bit of information, and perhaps sabotage a few legitimate muggle-side businesses belonging to those few Death Eaters I never could get my hands on. He was curious how I got his number, enough to distract him, but he has nothing to link back to me. I'm not going to use magic anywhere near him if I can help it, because I shouldn't like for _him_ of all people to break the Statute, but if you need my brains, I'll be there for you."

"Thanks, Granger." Sherlock's grin said that he didn't expect to need her help, but was glad she had offered.

She sighed, and prepared to leave the flat. "Think nothing of it. And Sherlock?"

"Yes, cousin dearest?"

"Don't underestimate him."

Sherlock's eyes grew cold. "I won't. Besides, what fun would it be if it were easy?"

…

John: I've just come from a meeting with your boss.

Hermione: About your new neighbors?

John: Yes. Got anything to add?

Hermione: Just that you know Mycroft has a bit of a tendency to be overprotective about his little brother. In this case, though, I think it's justified.

John: Fuck. He's back, isn't he?

Hermione: He's back. Sherlock knows. He insists it's under control.

John: Tell me everything you know.

Hermione: You know I can't do that, John.

John: Fuck you, Granger

…

Hermione: An assassination attempt?

Sherlock: Character assassination.

Hermione: Expected?

Sherlock: Not unexpected. The method? Ingenious.

Sherlock: Remind me to tell you about Hansel and Gretel when all this is over. Fascinating mind, our Jim.

Hermione: You should know, I've disposed of four tails this week.

Sherlock: Expected. As was the fact that you can take care of yourself.

Hermione: Do try to remember we're not pawns to be sacrificed.

Sherlock: Whoever said we were playing chess?


	23. 2011, June

The Weasley twins were not, to their sometime-girlfriend's eternal annoyance, the sort of business owners who kept bankers' hours. They could be found in the workspace behind their joke shop at any hour of the day or night, working or playing as their muses moved them. Everyone who knew them knew this, and that it was easiest to track them down if they _weren't_ at the shop by just waiting there until they arrived. Most people, however, waited in the main storefront, or else outside the back door.

Sherlock, either unaware or uncaring of this convention, had let himself in, bypassing wards to keep out witches and wizards and all manner of magical creature simply by virtue of not _being_ magical, and had spent a diverting half-hour poking around the various magical experiments the twins had left in progress while he waited for them to return.

"I'm telling you," a voice floated back from the main store, "color-changing charms have been overdone."

"Yeah, but if you want to shift the trend, we need a new fad!"

The magically powered lights came on as the twins entered, rendering Sherlock's torch obsolete.

"Sherlock" "Holmes?" the boys – Sherlock couldn't help but think of them as boys, even if they were only a few years younger than himself – stared at him in shock. "What're you doing here?" they asked as one.

"I've got a problem. Obviously. Been paying attention to the muggle press at all?"

"Not a bit of it, mate," Fred said.

"Care for a cuppa?" George offered, shooing the detective away from some of their more unstable work.

Sherlock nodded, and followed the twins to their business office. It was small and surprisingly organized, compared to the workshop or the storefront. The twins noticed his appraising look.

"No," George said, anticipating his snarky comment, "Hermione doesn't come in and do the books of a weekend. We can be organized when necessary."

Fred sniggered, "Though she did have _exactly_ the same look the first time she saw the inventory. Must run in the family."

Sherlock just rolled his eyes at the boys. "How is my dear cousin, anyway?"

"Oh, well, worried about you and your mad game with that Jimmy bloke," Fred grinned.

"And she's been taking the piss out of Mikey for you, since she's fair certain he had a hand in facilitating the whole business."

"Do thank her for me, after our business is concluded," Sherlock said drily. He had suspected something of the sort, of course.

The twins were sharp, he would give them that. They couldn't have kept up with Hermione if they weren't. "So we've got business, then." "And you don't want Hermione to know about it."

"Right in two."

"What is it then?" they asked, again in stereo.

The detective grinned broadly. "The endgame is in sight. I'm not sure on the details, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to die."

"Mite cheerful about that, mate?" George asked sarcastically.

"You mean you're not up for fooling all of London and my arch-nemesis into thinking I've died? Who are you, and what have you done with George?"

"Ah, well, when you put it like that…"

"Right. So you're in?"

The twins shrugged. "Yeah." "'course."

"Excellent. I'm not sure on the details, yet, but the broad strokes are these: We'll need a body double. I've got a spell that will work – Granger and I have used it before. And we'll need to switch it with my own body, preferably before I actually die. That'll be the tricky bit, and I expect we'll need to be in close communication for the next few days, which might be a trick as well."

"Nah, we'll give you one of the multi-com mirrors we've been working on." Fred disappeared from the office, presumably to fetch the device in question.

Sherlock raised an eye, and George explained his twin's offer. "They're like your mobile telephones, a bit, but the range is too limited for a practical release, yet. Still, as long as you're not leaving London, it should be fine."

"Got it!" Fred announced, tossing a compact mirror at Sherlock.

"Wait, here, we'll need to adjust the power-runes, since you're not a wizard."

Sherlock passed the mirror over, and George had it in pieces in a trice. He conjured engraving tools and set to work while the muggle continued to explain.

"I've already got a coroner on board who won't look too closely at any minor inconsistencies in trauma or whatever, she'll deal with the paperwork and having me officially killed off. I think we can count on Hermione to reverse it once everything's said and done, with no one the wiser. And I'll need a good disguise, something that will last long enough for me to get out of the country. Minor transfigurations should work. I've got false documentation already, if you'd make the disguises a bit permanent."

"Alter fingerprints, hair, eyes, take a few inches off your height and add a few pounds?" Fred offered.

"Need to change the bone structure of his face a bit, too," George added, handing the reassembled compact to Sherlock. "Try it. Just open and call for Forge Weasley."

Sherlock did so. George's pocket made a chiming sound, and when he opened his own compact, his face appeared in Sherlock's. "I'll leave the details of the escape to you two," he said, words echoing as George's compact repeated them with a slight delay.

"Sounds good, mate." George's voice came through the compact clearly enough.

"Is the delay on these constant, or is it affected by distance?"

"It's affected, but the curve is non-linear. We've not quite got that sorted yet," Fred said, rolling his eyes. "Mine is keyed to Gred Weasley. Hermione's got one, keyed to 'Granger,' but she leaves it at her flat all the time. Yours will be 'William Scott.' Can't be too careful on using your real name about."

"Right. So you'll let us know when you've got the details of how it's going to go down, and we'll coordinate the switch, since we've a better grasp of what we can do," George frowned. "What about that spell for the body double?"

Sherlock tapped his head. "Got a notebook? I'll copy it out."

…

Sherlock: Come and play. Bart's Hospital rooftop. SH

Sherlock: Got something of yours you might want back.

…

"Are you ready?"

"As ever. Got the details?"

"Half an hour, roof of St. Bart's hospital. I expect I'll have to jump."

"Right. We can make that work. Mid-air switching spell, soften the floor, quick arresto, should be doable. Place the disguise, apparate you to wherever. Can you make it an hour so we can find a good spot?"

"Best I can do is half an hour. Can you do it?"

"Of course we can. Give us a look at what you're wearing. It'll be done."

"Thanks, Fred."

"How do you -?"

Sherlock snapped the mirror closed on the question.

…

Sherlock: I've finally figured out his last clue.

Hermione: And?

Sherlock: It's time to end the game.

Hermione: Do you need my help?

Sherlock: It's handled. Tell Miss Evans I said adieu.

Hermione: Sherlock…

Sherlock: Goodbye, Hermione

Hermione: Goodbye? What are you doing?

Hermione: Sherlock?

Hermione: SHERLOCK!

Hermione: If you die, I will /never/ forgive you.

…

Unknown Number: I'm waiting… JM

…

Hermione Granger's mirror, lying abandoned in its usual spot, made a soft chiming sound as she returned from the funeral of Sherlock Holmes. She opened it to find her cousin's light eyes, corners crinkled with amusement.

"Think they bought it?" the man asked.

"Of course they did. John was crushed. Even Mycroft looked a bit lost."

"Yes, well, Mycroft's never done well with emotions. I'm going to go to his office tonight and give him a heart attack. Want to come watch?"

"No, I'll let you have your little revenge in private."

"You seem angry."

"John's a mess, and Molly's not much better. Mrs. Hudson was acting like she'd lost a son, and your mum thinks she really _did_ lose a son. I've spent all day lying to all of them, and trying to explain to my one-year-old daughter what it means that her favorite uncle is dead. She's going to be so confused when you come back. You are coming back, aren't you?"

"I've got a criminal organization to dis-assemble, first. But yes, eventually," the detective admitted.

"I suppose you and the twins have got everything planned out, then?"

"You said you didn't want to use magic around him."

"So you got my boyfriends to do it instead?"

"Obviously. Besides, he was dead by that point. We were really just putting on a show for his gunmen."

"One day, Sherlock. One day you're going to cut things too close and absolutely ruin yourself."

"But not today." Sherlock grinned, more than pleased to have pulled off his stunt.

Hermione sighed loudly at her mirror. "You know, I used to think you were smarter than my other friends…"

"This is the best way, Hermione. The only way to end it, once and for all."

"Yes, well, I distinctly remember thinking the same thing, once upon a time."

"Yes, well, that was, what, fifteen years ago? If I come up with a better solution in ten years, feel free to say you told me so."

Hermione couldn't help but smile a bit at that. "John's going to be right pissed, you know, when you finally tell him. And I want to be there when you tell your mum. She's going to kill you for real."

Sherlock winced. His mother was a formidable woman, even if neither he nor Mycroft was often willing to admit it. "I'm going to be out of the country for a while. Not sure how long. Do me a favor and see what you can do with Lestrade to get my name cleared. And if Mycroft's not in a conciliatory mood, I may need you to fudge some records for me when I get back."

"Even if he is in the mood to help you, I'll still be doing the legwork. Lazy arse. But yes, it should be easy enough to unravel Rich Brook posthumously. We won't be able to get public opinion back on your side, but we ought to be able to get all the official issues cleared up. Give me a call when you're back in town, and I'll take care of the loose ends then."

"Thanks Granger. You really are my favorite." Sherlock gave his cousin a winning smile.

"I know. And by the way, you didn't need to tell me it was an Adler Ploy. Magic bond, remember? I'd have known if my blood-brother died."

"Is that your way of telling me not to die for real?"

"If you do, I'll learn enough necromancy to bring you back and kill you myself."

"Love you too, little sis."

"Don't call me that, it's creepy."

"Well, I thought it was creepy watching you mourn me, so we're even."

"Did you _want_ me to just tell everyone now? Because I could…"

"Oh, I had no doubt you could manage it, but that doesn't make it less creepy. Psychopath."

"Nonsense, I'm just a very good actress. Jackass."

"Witch."

"Arsehole."

"I'll check in when I can."

"Be careful."

"Always."


	24. 2011, July

Hermione: John, I know we haven't been on the best of terms, but I'm worried about you.

Hermione: It's been weeks, John.

Hermione: If you don't answer me, I'm going to have to come track you down.

John: I'm fine. Leave me alone.

Hermione: Liar. We're having lunch this Saturday.

John: Hermione, I'm fine. Really. I just need time. Okay?

…

There was a knock on the door. It had to be for Charles. He certainly wasn't expecting anyone.

Another knock. Bloody wanker. Invites someone over and then can't be arsed to get the door?

A third knock. A voice, muffled by two intervening doors, finally made its way to his ear. "John Hamish Watson, I know you're in there. If you don't come open this door, I'm coming in anyway, and then won't you be embarrassed."

There was a moment of silence.

"You have thirty seconds, John."

John could just imagine Hermione standing on his front step, tapping her toe impatiently. He hadn't really expected her to show up. But he definitely didn't want her to come in and find him still abed. He reluctantly stumbled to the door.

"Hello, John." Hermione smiled warmly at him, brushing past, into the flat. Her little girl waved. What was her name again?

"I thought you weren't coming," he said stupidly.

" _That_ , is obvious," the woman said, giving him a thorough once-over. "Go have a shower and shave. I've made reservations at Terra Munda for one."

"Hermione, I told you not to come."

"Did you? Must have missed the memo. Go on, then. We haven't all the time in the world."

The bloody woman _shooed_ him inside his own bloody flat. Only the presence of the small child saved her from a few choice expletives. He turned on his heel and stomped to the bathroom. Infuriating… _woman_.


	25. 2011, August

Dear Sherlock:

I'm writing you this letter even though you're dead, because Hermione says I ought to get things out, even if I never actually say them to a real person, and well, let's face it, if you could do that, to me, leaving aside whether it was all a bloody "magic trick" – if you could leave me like that, you weren't ever a real person, were you? Even if you were alive. And besides, she got me this nice journal, and everything.

I was so angry at you.

I still am angry at you.

How could you do it?

You know you're the only good friend I have in this town. Mike's alright, I suppose, and Greg's not a bad bloke – but I'm not close with them.

You dying, no, KILLING yourself – it's like losing a brother. Actually, I think I'm more upset than I would have been if Harry died. God, that's a terrible thing to say, isn't it? But from her it would be, I dunno. More expected, maybe. You – you thrived on pressure. I never thought you would give up on your bloody "game" like that. Even if you were losing. Hermione says you weren't, but then, she can be just as bad as you, sometimes.

As you were.

Fuck.

I still can't think of you as being gone.

I'm still half convinced you'll show up at dinner some night dressed as a bloody waiter or something and be all, 'Hello, John,' like nothing's happened.

You could have asked for help.

You didn't need to kill yourself.

There's always another way.

If you were still alive, and it were anyone else who'd died, I suppose you'd be making fun of me, now, for bothering with this tripe at all. Like the blog, but it's not even anything interesting. The little voice in my head that sounds like you certainly is. Fuck you, getting inside my head. I hate you. I miss you. My limp is back, you bloody tosser. I've applied to work at a clinic near my new flat – you didn't think I'd stay at Baker Street, did you? Too many memories.

So that's another one for your tally – thanks to you I've lost my best mate, and my flat.

I have a new flatmate, Charles. Bleeding tosser. Can't stand him. He's got nothing on you for bad habits, but he's just too cheerful all the time. Hermione says he's going to kill someone someday. Sounds a bit like Donovan about you, actually.

So I'm looking for a new job, so I can get a place of my own. I think you've ruined me for flatmates, you bastard.

I imagine you saying, "My parents were married," with a perfectly straight face – that's exactly what Mycroft said when I called him a bastard for not crying at your funeral. Hermione says he really was upset, even if he didn't look it.

I've just re-read what I've written, and realized I've talked about Hermione a lot. She's been visiting. Miri, too. She's talking, now. I've only seen much of them and Greg, and he's not really the talking sort. More the drinking and complaining about the world sort.

I've been trying to get out more. It's really frustrating, realizing that my life revolved so much around someone who couldn't be arsed to tell me he was thinking about bloody killing himself. Someone who clearly didn't give a shit about me, or thought I was too thick to talk to about this or whatever. I never realized how much time I spent with you until you… left.

I don't think you lied to me about everything. That first night, in the cab – you were too… disappointed, thinking Harry was my brother. And Hermione and Mycroft, they're real. You couldn't fake them, even if you could've faked yourself.

I don't understand why you would say it was all a lie when it wasn't.

I wish you trusted me enough to tell me.

I hate you. But I wish you weren't dead.

JHW

* * *

Favorite relative,

Is this a gift or a guilt trip?

SH

…

Can't it be both?

HG

…

Can I write to him?

SH

…

Best not. He doesn't know about Department M, and you're supposed to be working on dismantling a criminal empire, are you not?

HG

…

I'm between cells right now. I presume these are our-eyes-only? If so, tell me how you made them. If not, tell me anyway. It's not as though anyone would believe it. I doubt most people here even speak English.

SH

…

You sound bored.

HG

…

So bored, Granger, you cannot possibly understand. I'm on a chicken bus and the couple next to me has been arguing about a pig for over an hour.

SH

…

Yes, they're charmed. To anyone else, it will look like notes on Darwin's Origin of Species, because that's what was handy when I was making them. It's a linking enchantment, a twinning spell. If you were close enough, it would update in real time. As it is, there can be up to a six-hour delay, based on where you are in the world, proximity to lines of power, etc. I'll copy over the arithmancy when I get home.

HG

…

Thanks.

SH

...

Granger, how do you do it?

…

What?

HG

…

I know what you did in your war, and... after. You have a look sometimes that I've only seen on contract killers, so don't bother trying to deny it. How do you do… what you did, what I'm doing, and stay sane?

SH

…

You don't.

You just try to go mad in a way that will let you function regardless.

You accept the reality of what you're doing – killing people, or driving them mad, or taking their memories and everything that makes them human – and you weigh every option, and you convince yourself over and over that it is necessary, and then that it was necessary. You make the choice enough times in hindsight that it seems inevitable, until you no longer question if you did the right thing. And you still wake up in the night ten years later, hating yourself for killing people whom the world is objectively better off without. You push those feelings away, perfect your mask of normalcy, and only let that side of yourself out when you can't help it, or it's… needed.

…

Psychopath.

…

No, I'm not, and neither are you.

…

Thanks.

…

Don't mention it.

Really.

Ever.

HG


	26. 2011, October

I don't know what to think anymore. I don't know what to believe. I know you're dead. In my head, I know it. But I can't believe it. And… this is going to sound really stupid, so I'm glad no one else will ever know. I just get the feeling they're not telling me everything. Hermione and Mycroft. More Mycroft, actually. It's not anything he says, just… He's been checking up on me.

And I can't think why he'd bother.

So far as I know, I became useless to him as soon as you stepped off that bloody building.

Hermione still talks about you sometimes like she's going to see you again, and I guess that's normal enough. At first I thought she was just doing it because I couldn't move on to past-tense. She gave me a book about dealing with grief, and one of the things it says is to let people closest to the one who died dictate how they deal with things, letting them move on at their own pace. I thought she was waiting for me, but maybe she's still dealing with it herself. But it's odd. Aside from that, she's been coping better than I have by far.

Sometimes I wonder if she expected something like this, from you.

She knew you longer than I did. She had to know you better.

But I can't bring myself to ask.

The weird thing, though, and the thing I can't let go of, is the paranoid, suspicious thought that maybe… maybe she did expect something. Maybe she's doing it on purpose. Maybe… maybe she knows more than I do.

Well, I just re-read that, and it seems like a dumb thing to say. Of course she knows more than I do. But what I meant was, maybe you're not dead.

And I know I shouldn't believe it, and I know I should just give up hope, because it's just going to hurt more in the long run because you are dead.

It would just be easier to believe that if Mycroft wasn't still paying attention to me.

…

It's Halloween today, and I'm drunk.

I never drink.

But I was with Hermione and the Potters and Harry said he needed a drink, not my Harry, her Harry, because nothing good ever happened on Halloween.

They told me about their war. About their friend Ron, would've been Harry's brother in law. Ginny's brother. He died. One of their best friends. Years ago, now, and they talked about him like he died yesterday, with all the kids running around in the background, being witches and wizards for the day. It was kind of cute, they were so serious about it all.

But Harry and Ginny and Hermione, they were sad, but not…

Like it had been long enough for them to remember the bad things and the good and like they missed him but I dunno. They moved on, I guess.

And it hurt. God, it hurt so bad, hearing them talk about him. I – I really, really wanted to say I understood. I wanted to tell them how I felt about you leaving. How I knew what it was like, losing a part of your life like that. I just… couldn't.

God.

You'd think I'd never known anyone who died before.

But this guy, Ron, they grew up with him. He was closer to them than family.

That's how I feel about you. Felt. Feel.

Fuck this.

Fuck you, and fuck feeling like such a fucking sap all the bloody fucking time over a bloody moron who obviously didn't feel the same way.

If you did, you'd have said something, or I dunno, not killed your fucking stupid self.

I…

I just can't do this anymore.

Fuck.


	27. 2012, February

Tonight was a bad night.

I've been getting better.

Sometimes I go days, weeks at a time, now, without thinking of him. You. These were supposed to be 'Letters to Sherlock' after all.

In which case I have to say, Sherlock, you're a bloody bastard, finding ways to interrupt my dates from beyond the sodding grave.

I met this girl online. Hermione's been pushing me to try dating again, which is ripe, coming from her, since she's not seriously dated anyone that I know of since I've known her. Anyway, her name is Caroline, though I don't know why I'd bother telling you. It's not like you ever would have used it. (That's right, I know you knew their names. Hermione spilled the beans on you ages ago.) She's new to London, a post-doc arts student from America. She studies classical influences in modern architecture, I think. The details were a bit over my head, to be honest. She's a fair bit younger than me, but she didn't seem to mind.

We went out to dinner at that little Korean place you showed me off Piccadilly, and then walked around the city for a while.

It was going really well until we came across this kid busking with a violin. Well, I say busking, but really it was more like he was playing for himself and we all just happened to be there as well.

He reminded me of you.

Didn't look anything alike, mind, but the way he played, and the way he didn't seem to give a damn about anyone or anything around him – It was just like being back in our flat, on the days when you were happy, but between cases.

I imagine that's what you were like as a kid. You did drugs and lived rough for a while, I know. I can't help wondering if you were ever that teenager playing on a street corner somewhere, secretly basking in the admiration of passers-by even as you pretended to ignore them.

Anyway, Caroline noticed I was distracted, after. The night didn't end well, as you can probably guess – sorry "deduce" – since I'm writing a letter to a dead man instead of being at her place right now.

So, congratulations, you utter jackass. You're still the most important person in my life, even though it's been eight months since you died. And you've managed to ruin yet another date for me, and I didn't even get to go chase a murderer out of it.

Bloody hell, I just wrote that I wanted to go chase down a murderer. You were obviously contagious, and now I've got whatever you had. Git.


	28. 2012, March

Mary Morstan left John's flat smiling the morning after their third date, turning down an offer of pancakes with a counter-offer of lunch the next day. John, quite content with this arrangement, made pancakes for himself, anyway and settled in to consider whether he thought this one might last. After dumping his plate in the sink, he found he had reached a conclusion which warranted the sending of a text.

John: I've met someone. You can stop trying to set me up, now.

Hermione: Good for you! Bring her to Miri's party this weekend.

…

John helped Mary from the taxi rather gallantly and surveyed the park, looking for the little girl's birthday party they were meant to be attending. He spotted it almost at once – between the plethora of redheads, half a dozen or more young children running about excitedly, and the familiar sound of Hermione giving orders to the man who was delivering a cake, there was really no mistaking them. He groaned when he realized Mycroft was there, and a much older woman, who must be Violet Holmes.

"Don't worry, John," Mary said, leaning into his side. "I'm sure it will be fine."

He grinned. "That transparent, am I?"

He loved the way her eyes sparkled as she gave him a crooked little smile. "It's not a bad thing."

He introduced Mary to the adults – Harry and Ginny Potter were there, of course, and Fred and George Weasley, who he _still_ couldn't tell apart, despite having met them on at least two prior occasions, along with Mycroft and the woman who was indeed Sherlock's 'Mummy' – as well as to the two-year-old birthday girl.

"Hello, Miss Morstan," the little girl said solemnly, holding out a hand to be shaken.

Mary, to her credit, had returned the birthday girl's greeting with equal seriousness, and waited until she had run off to play with the Potter children (and their friends? He had no idea who the other children belonged to, and no one had thought to introduce them) before she commented on how adult the child acted.

Hermione threw an exasperated look after her daughter, toddling after a red-headed girl, as Mycroft pointed out that the girl took after her mother.

"Some days I wonder if that's a good thing," the mother in question muttered, watching the child give up on keeping up with the older children, settling to watch them and play with some flowers instead.

"It is, love," Violet said with the knowing smile all women with adult children seemed to share. "Just watch, she's going to grow up faster than you know."

As Violet commiserated with Hermione and Ginny about the difficulties of raising small children, John watched Mary watching the kiddies. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, feeling her stiffen at the unexpected contact, then relax as she recognized him. He rested his head on her shoulder and murmured, "You want to have kids someday?"

It wasn't really a question. He had seen the longing in her eyes as she watched the little boys falling over themselves and each other, or Miri demanding to sit on Mycroft's perfectly tailored lap. She answered anyway, and her voice was inexplicably sad when she said, "Someday. You?"

John was taken aback. He'd never given the idea of kids much thought, a fact which Hermione had teased him about several times over the nearly two years she had known him. None of his relationships had ever reached a point where it was relevant before, but she hadn't been wrong when she told him at their first meeting that he wasn't necessarily against the idea. He hesitated, then said, firmly, "Yes. Definitely."

After all, taking care of a kid couldn't possibly be any harder than living with Sherlock, and the light in Mary's eyes when she turned and kissed him made any wariness he felt at the idea of fatherhood more than worth it.

He chatted with Harry and watched, pleased and somewhat proud, as his bonny girl joined the other women, laughing and socializing, charming the lot of them. He hadn't realized, before, how worried he had been that the few people he considered close friends would not accept her. It was a relief, watching her dance with the Potters' oldest boy, bantering and laughing with Hermione and the twins, or teaching Miri how to make flower chains.

For the first time in a long time, John realized, he was happy, and not even Mycroft's subtle offer to do a background check on his girlfriend (which John refused with a glare at the older man) could bring him down. Not today.


	29. 2012, April

I did it. I looked at all the old case files today. Not on purpose. They were in a box I didn't remember packing, and I had to open it to see what it was… I'm not sorry I did. They were good times.

It just feels like, well… like that part of my life is over, now. I'm ready to settle and move on with things. So I put everything back, and I wrote on the blog that I still believe in him – in you – and now… now I'm putting this journal in that box, and moving on.

This is good.

This is a good thing.

Maybe if I keep telling myself that, it will stop feeling like I'm betraying you, somehow.

…

Hermione,

Please don't let John move on without me. I'm coming back. Six months, and it will be done. I… Please. I want to have something to come back to. I need something to look forward to.

SH

…

"Hey, John!" Hermione waved cheerfully from a table near a window as the man in question entered the restaurant. He slipped past the greeter and joined her, hanging his cane from the back of his chair.

"Hermione, long time no see," he smiled. It was a running joke – they ran into each other at least once every other week. John was secretly convinced that Mycroft was somehow manipulating their schedules to get them alone together for unofficial therapy sessions. He also secretly suspected that Hermione was in on it, but he had never asked. He preferred to pretend they were just friends, and she seemed happy to do the same. "Where's Miri?"

"Oh, Molly's baby-sitting so I can get a bit of proper shopping done. She said she'd rather spend her day off teaching anatomy to a two-year-old than get dragged off to the shops again, sooo…"

"You're letting Molly teach Miri anatomy?" John had to raise an eyebrow at this.

Hermione shrugged. "Maybe. I'm getting a free sitter, and like I said, I'm pretty sure they're at her flat, not the morgue. But I think she was just making a point. So, how have you been?"

"Oh, you know, all right. I've been going through some old things, you know, getting ready for Mary to move in."

"Ooh, I was wondering if that's what it was, when I saw you updated the blog, you know."

"Yeah, well, that was a kind of down day, but on the whole, it's been really exciting. I'm… ready to move on, I think. Maybe type up some of the old cases if I have the time, but…"

"You're over him?"

John wasn't sure what to make of Hermione's tone when she said that. "Well… I don't know that I'll ever really be _over_ him, I mean, it's Sherlock… do you think anyone really gets over Sherlock? But it's like I'm… awake, again. Like I can live my life now. D'you know what I mean?" he asked, hoping rather desperately that she did, and wouldn't get angry at him on Sherlock's behalf.

She just nodded and said in a rather sad voice, "Yeah. Yeah, I know. Listen, John, I… I have to go. I… I can't do this. Not today."

"Wha-?" but before John could articulate his question, she was gone.

…

John: Are you alright?

Hermione: Yes, of course.

John: Why did you run out like that?

John: Hermione?

…

Sherlock,

I can't do it. I can't stop him from living his life. He thinks you're dead. It would be cruel to stop him from healing. I… I just can't. This is what happens when you fake your own death – the world moves on without you. I'm sorry.

I'll be here for you to return to, and Miri and the Weasleys, and even Mycroft. I expect your mum and Mrs. Hudson will forgive you eventually. John will, too, you know. But I'm not going to force him to wait for you without even telling him why. I honestly don't know if I could.

If he knew you were alive, he would wait forever, you know that. You were his world. He still believes in you. But you did your job too well, and he thinks you're gone, and it's better for him to move on.

Telling him you're alive with no proof... I think it might break him. Either that or he'd think I'd gone mad.

I'm so, so sorry.

Hermione

…

I know you're waiting, but it's not the same. You're family. John is John.

He's the only close friend I ever had. He's the only person outside the family I've ever managed to live with for more than two months. He's the only person other than you (and Mycroft, regrettably) who gets anywhere near understanding me.

You told me once that you needed me to say you hadn't done the wrong thing with your parents, leaving them in Australia. That's what John is to me. He's the person who tells me when I've gone too far. He accepts me for who I am, without being related to me, and without being a grifter or a psychopath himself (Adler says hello, by the way – when did you two even meet?). The only normal person.

Ugh, that looks so ridiculous and twee written out. I swear, your psycho-babble is contagious. Why can't I erase anything in this book?!

It is every bit as cruel to leave me wondering if John will have changed too much to let me back into his life as it would be to give the poor man some hope that his lost best friend is really alive. It's not as though I won't be back.

SH

…

First off, John will never have changed too much to let you back into his life. This is John we're talking about, he's a little bit in love with you, and I'm pretty sure he always will be. You're right. He understands you, and he'll understand why you had to leave, eventually. It would hurt him just as much if not more if I told him now that you lied to him and were still alive as it will when you come back and tell him yourself.

Secondly, what you're doing is dangerous. Extremely dangerous. There is a very real chance you won't come back, and we both know it. He's moving on. I'm not going to tell him you're alive, and then have to tell him you died again, for real this time. He'd never believe me. It would drive him round the twist.

Also, the boys like you well enough; I met Irene on one of the nights you blew her off for dinner, but she didn't realize who I was until well after you rescued her in Karachi (we've been keeping in touch since then by post); and you can't erase things because it amused me to charm the notebooks so you couldn't erase things. Think of it as a conversation – you can't un-say anything.

HG

…

I hate it when you're right.

SH


	30. 2012, June

"Hermione Granger," Hermione answered her phone curtly, trying to juggle her daughter, her coffee, and her mobile while digging her keys out of her bag. They had just spent a rather stressful day visiting a mourning Violet Holmes, and a stop at the nearest coffee chain had been a necessary evil.

"Hermione? Oh, good! It's Mary. Mary Morstan? John's girlfriend?"

"Yes, Mary, hi, how are you?"

"Well, I'm fine, but, ah… It's John. He came home plastered half an hour ago, and he won't say anything coherent. Yours was the last number he called, just this afternoon, and I was wondering if you might know what happened," the woman explained, faintly accusingly.

Hermione groaned. "It's been a year today," she said quietly. "I bet you anything he and Lestrade went out and got smashed in memory of Sherlock."

" _Oh_." Mary's voice was heavy with understanding. "Well, bugger me."

"Do you want me to come over?" Hermione offered, hoping that Mary would refuse. She didn't particularly want Miranda to see her 'Uncle John' drunk off his arse.

"No, no, that's okay. Now that I know what's going on… Yeah, I think I can handle it. Thanks, love. Text me some day and I'll buy you lunch for a thank-you."

"That's really not necessary," Hermione hedged. She didn't particularly like or dislike John's girlfriend. She was happy that the other woman had managed to draw her friend out a bit, and they had met in passing a few times, including at Miri's birthday party, but there was something vaguely off-putting about her, as though she was slightly too perfect for him to be believed.

Hermione's careful prodding had not revealed any hidden agenda on the woman's part, and her background check came back clear. If she was playing him for some reason (and Hermione couldn't fathom what this reason might be, as John had neither money nor political pull, despite his tenuous association with Mycroft), she was very good, and must have someone in Intelligence covering her tracks.

"Nonsense! You've been such a good friend to _my_ John, and I'd love to get to know you better."

The witch groaned internally. A fishing mission. She had never had many female friends, but she had enough male friends that she was more than familiar with the air of a woman trying to ferret out whether she was sleeping with them. "Well, how could I say no to that?" she asked rhetorically, hiding her irritation and resignation, and wishing, not for the first time, that she could bring herself to be as rude to people as Sherlock. He would have just pointed out that if Hermione wanted John, she could have had him long before Mary entered the picture, and had no desire to do so.

"Well, obviously, you can't," Mary replied, something in her tone hinting at amusement. "So I'll be waiting on that text."

"All right, then. Talk to you later," Hermione said, with all the cheerfulness she didn't feel, and then added (only a little spitefully), "Tell John that if he needs to talk, I'm here for him."


	31. 2012, November

Hermione Granger's communication mirror – the outdated version, with the range limited to the greater London area that only one person, who had been out of said limited range for nearly a year and a half, would have an excuse to use, made a soft chiming sound from the corner of her desk.

She answered it with a grin. She might be irritated that her cousin had taken so long to call her now that he was back – she had gotten his message saying he was on his way home well over three weeks ago – but she was too happy that he was back safe to yell at him.

"Sherlock!" she squealed, like the childish schoolgirl she never had been.

"Granger," Sherlock's greeting was the same as it ever was, but she saw lines of tension ease around his light eyes, and there was relief in his tone.

Her joy at seeing him safe in London and the fact that he was glad to be back; that they had both missed each other far more than either was willing to admit; that the work he had done had worn on him terribly and that she was concerned for him about that; that he was relieved that she wasn't going to give him hell for making her worry or for running off like he had, but that he'd thought she might, and her brief irritation that _really, you should know me better by now_ , were patently obvious in their expressions, and did not need to be said aloud.

"What took so long?"

Sherlock made a face that said distinctly that Mycroft had been involved.

"I apparently wrote too soon. I finished up what I predicted was the last job, but was captured by a local paramilitary unit I'd had… an altercation with, just outside of Belgrade."

Mycroft had asked Hermione to track the movements and arrange the extraction of a British agent from an extra-legal detainment center in rural Serbia a week after Sherlock's note. Another two weeks from then to now would mean that Sherlock had been seriously injured and needed time to recover before contacting people. "That bloody bastard! He told me that was an Intelligence extraction!"

"And you believed him?" Sherlock raised a mocking eyebrow.

Hermione scowled at him. "He sent a memo. Easier to lie when it's not to my face. Did he go to fetch you in person? He disappeared for three days two weeks ago, and Anthea told me he was at a Summit Conference, which is what she always says when I'm not authorized to know and she thinks it will make me feel bad to say so straight on."

Sherlock nodded and smirked. "He even wore a costume."

Hermione had been about to threaten her elder cousin with an untimely and untraceable death, but that comment threw her. "I… don't think I've ever seen him not in a suit."

"Even his pajamas are bespoke silk."

And suddenly the two of them were laughing like they never did with anyone else. No one else knew them well enough. Mycroft might, but he would abstain due to his disdain for sentiment, and even if John lived with Sherlock for another eight years, he would never know about magic, or what it was like to hunt down and systematically execute terrorists who were out to kill everyone you loved, or how hard it was to deal with average people day in and day out when all you truly wanted was a break from the mundane and so-very-obvious.

When their laughter finally eased, Hermione asked, "When are you coming to see Miri and me? I'll have the boys over and we can do a family dinner."

"Depends how things go with John."

Hermione raised an eyebrow, only slightly surprised that he was planning to visit his doctor first. He had already seen Mycroft, after all, and this was almost as good, though he was going to owe her a hug when she did finally catch him in person. "When are you going to visit _John_?"

"Tonight. In a couple of hours."

Late-ish, then. Probably planning to just show up at his flat with no warning. She could see the sense in just showing up in person, though she did rather worry it would go poorly without any warning on Sherlock's part. "Do you want me there to mediate?"

"Best not."

"Ten pounds says he punches you in the face at least once."

Sherlock looked uncharacteristically nervous. "No bet."

"Oh, come off it. We've already talked about this. You know he'll forgive you eventually."

"How can you know? Mycroft seems to think he won't want to see me."

The uncertainty in his voice ate at her heart. "Oh, Sherlock… Mycroft's an idiot. Never listen to him. Not about human things, at least."

"Thanks, Hermione."

"No problem. And Sherlock?"

"Yes?"

"Let's not do this again," she said, referring to the whole eighteen months' running off to play assassin.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Agreed. Being dead is so _dull_."

"Arsehole."

"Witch."

Hermione ended the call with a grin. Some things never changed. Now to call Mycroft and inquire as to whether he had spoken to Violet yet regarding the fact that her younger son was still, against all the odds (and the funeral), not actually dead. Probably not. Sherlock wouldn't have done, either. Hermione rather thought it should be Mycroft's responsibility, anyway, just for not telling her that he was haring off to Serbia to rescue Sherlock.

…

Sherlock: John is Not Pleased. I did not tell him you knew. You're welcome. Will keep you posted.

Sherlock: Also, why did you not tell me John is getting engaged?

Sherlock: This is pertinent information, Granger!

Hermione: Pay attention to John.

Hermione: He's going to get pissy if you're texting and not apologizing.

Sherlock: He and Mary just left.

Sherlock: Why are you letting my John get engaged to an ex-spy?

Hermione: /Your/ John? Mary?

Sherlock: Former. Spy. Interesting, therefore, name.

Hermione: I was leaning toward assassin myself.

Sherlock: Like that's any better.

Hermione: Glass houses, Sherlock.

Sherlock: Do you trust her?

Hermione: To do what?

Sherlock: She said she would talk John around. Acted like she likes me.

Hermione: Yes. And she probably does. Brings your total up to… eight.

Sherlock: Her, you… maybe John?

Hermione: Irene, Molly, Greg, Fred, George, and yes, John. Oh, and Mrs. Hudson. Nine. You're growing quite popular, you know.

Sherlock: Speaking of, I'm at Bart's now.

Hermione: Say hi to Molly for me.

…

An hour later, just before midnight, Hermione's bedside, landline telephone, meticulously warded to avoid magico-electrical interference, rang. She hauled herself upright reluctantly to answer it. "Hullo?"

"Hermione? It's Greg." Greg sounded nervous.

"Hey, Greg. Wha's'up?"

"You, um, might want to sit down."

"Greg? What's wrong?"

"Are you sitting?"

" _Yes_."

"It's Sherlock. He's not dead."

Hermione burst into relieved laughter. "Oh, thank God!"

"You – you're alright?"

"Yeah, no! Jesus, Greg, I thought you were going to say Molly's in hospital or something."

"You knew," he accused.

"Well… yes, I did. I've been in contact with him periodically. Are _you_ okay?"

"Aside from thinking I was going to have a heart attack in the bloody car park? Yeah, fine. He still doesn't know my name, you know."

"Of course he does. He probably also knows your parents' names and your National Insurance number. He just likes to pretend he doesn't care about you."

Greg muttered something incomprehensible.

"Sorry?"

"I _said_ all the Holmeses are bloody mad."

Hermione snorted. "I'm not sure I know anyone who'd disagree with you, there."

"So you've known, then, all along? And you just… let us all mourn."

"Well, I suppose, if you want to put it like that. Yes." Hermione said, after a short pause. "It had to be realistic. Moriarty had snipers targeting you, John, and Mrs. Hudson."

Greg sighed loudly. "Who else knew? Mycroft? Molly? I bet she did know – she signed off on the autopsy! Who else?"

"You _know_ I can't tell you that. Mycroft will've had the whole operation declared Classified, at the very least."

"Ugh! Fuck it. I'll just bugger off then, you know, go deal with all the petty little crimes and laws that you lot are apparently above!"

"Come on, Greg," Hermione wheedled. "It's not like that. He didn't even tell John. And," she added, as inspiration struck, "I really do appreciate your calling me to let me know. No one else thought to."

"You're welcome," Greg said gruffly.

"It _is_ the middle of the night, though, so, ah, if you don't mind?"

The DI gave what seemed like a reluctant chuckle. "Yeah, alright. Sleep well, Hermione."

"Sleep well, Greg."

…

John: Did you know about this?

John: Sherlock, being alive.

John: Damn it, Hermione!

Less than five minutes after the last text was sent, Hermione's phone rang again. "Hullo? Wasa time?"

"Oh, um. Sorry. It's… just gone three? Shit, I'm _really_ sorry. I can call back in the morning." John sounded terribly embarrassed.

"'s alright. I'm up, now. What is it?"

"Did you know?"

"Know what?"

"About Sherlock. Being alive."

"Ah… Greg was much nicer when he called."

"You did, didn't you! Goddamnit! He lied to me!"

"It's Sherlock. He lies to you all the time. Poisons your tea. Does decomposition experiments in the kitchen. If you minded all that much, you wouldn't have stuck around so long," Hermione said muzzily.

"Not about things like this. Not about – he let me think he was _dead_. _YOU_ let me think he was dead!"

"We had to make it convincing, John. Did he not tell you Moriarty had snipers on you? And Mrs. Hudson? And Lestrade? He didn't even tell Mycroft until after the funeral. I was the only one there that knew."

"What about Molly? He said he told Molly, and Mycroft, and his homeless people, but no one else."

"Ah, no. I'm not sure who all knew beforehand. He gave me a hint on the roof that he wasn't actually dying, but then, he gave you one too, didn't he? I think he expected you to put it together before now."

"What hint?" John sounded outraged.

Hermione quoted the transcript of the conversation Mycroft had somehow obtained from John's phone. "'It's a trick. Just a magic trick,' remember? And I've only ever talked about him in the present tense to you. We both wanted you to know, but we wanted you to get there on your own. You were under surveillance for a while. It would have been bad if you'd had whatever reaction you had today, a year ago. And by the time it was safe to tell you, you were already coming to terms with it, and I didn't want to tell you he was alive, just to have to tell you later that he'd been killed in some third-world cesspool. Understand?"

John gave an absolutely humorless laugh. "Yeah. That's the worst part. I do. I understand exactly why he thought it was necessary. I can even understand why _you_ couldn't tell me. But I will never understand how he thinks it's alright to show up out of the blue and interrupt my proposal to Mary, and make jokes about my moustache and just… keep lying, even after all that!"

Hermione could only blame her utter exhaustion for her response. "Well, it is a horrible moustache. Mary hates it – wait," she did a verbal double-take. "You actually proposed? Oh, good for you, John. Congratulations!"

"Yeah, she said yes, when I finally got around to asking her properly… in the cab, on the way home. Least romantic thing ever."

"Well, she'd have to be an idiot to say no."

"Thanks, Hermione."

"Yes, well, someone in the family had to get the social competency genes, and it certainly wasn't either one of the boys."

John groaned at the reminder of Sherlock. "I'm going to go to bed now. Again."

"Okay. Good. Me too. Talk to you later, eh?"

"Yeah."

"Sleep well, John."

John must still have been a bit irritated with her, because he didn't return the farewell before he rang off. Hermione was, admittedly, far too tired to care. She was asleep again before she managed to settle the phone properly in its cradle.

…

Hermione: What have you done to Mycroft?

Hermione: He's acting… odd…

Sherlock: Suggested he's lonely and should adopt a goldfish.

Sherlock: What's he doing?

Hermione: Slightly more staring into space than usual, and he had no taste for dessert at lunch.

Sherlock: That worked better than I expected.

Hermione: Hard to say if he's more disturbed that you're giving him relationship advice at all or that he might have given away some sign of being lonely.

Sherlock: Could be both.

Hermione: Got a goldfish in mind for him?

Sherlock: Seriously, or as a joke?

Hermione: Either.

Sherlock: Seriously Harry Potter; as a joke, Anthea. Romantically.

Hermione: I'll get right on it.

Sherlock: This is why you're my favorite.

Hermione: Because I help you prank Mycroft?

Sherlock: And also because I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have waited and watched me get beaten bloody before intervening in Serbia.

Hermione: What about Greg, romantically.

Sherlock: Is Lestrade bisexual?

Hermione: Nope.

Sherlock: That's even better. Do it.

…

Mycroft: You'd better be joking about getting me a goldfish.

Hermione: I think you and Harry would be great friends. He's a bit slow, of course, but hardly ever dull, and a decent native philosopher. Lestrade, too, actually. And stop monitoring mine and Sherlock's texts.

Mycroft: But you and Sherlock are far more entertaining than goldfish. Especially now that you're both in London again. Why would I want one of those when I have you two?

Hermione: Decoration? Godlike power over the life of another living creature?

Mycroft: I already have Anthea for that. And the entire United Kingdom.

Hermione: You two were the ones who chose the analogy. I'd have said a child, so you can attempt to relate to it and teach it things.

Mycroft: That assumes some potential to learn… Can I have Miri? She at least shows promise.

Hermione: She's only two, and she set Al Potter on fire last week because he wouldn't give her the last biscuit. You can have her whenever you want.

Mycroft: Oh, god… it would be like Sherlock all over again… but worse. At least he had to use matches. Never mind.

Hermione: That's what I thought. And Smith from MI6 is whinging about the terror alert level.

Mycroft: Can I flush him?

Hermione: No.

Hermione: Unfortunately.

Hermione: The Queen said to play nice.

Mycroft: Interagency cooperation does not require Smith's specific or personal involvement.

Hermione: Still…

Mycroft: Fine.

…

Mycroft: Deal with Smith from MI6.

Anthea: Yes, sir.

…

Sherlock: Fixed it.

Hermione: Fixed what?

Sherlock: John. And the terror threat.

Hermione: Are those two related?

Sherlock: Only insofar as I convinced John that we were about to get blown up with parliament to make him realizes how much he really does care about me.

Hermione: Wow. The twins will be so impressed.

Hermione: Also, really? Blowing up Parliament? On Bonfire night?

Sherlock: I'm torn between declaring it trite and adorable.

Hermione: Trite. Bit less not good.

Sherlock: Adorable it is then!

…

Sherlock: Why is Molly engaged to my doppelganger?

Sherlock: And why didn't you tell me?

Hermione: Because she's obviously still a bit obsessed with you. And because I didn't want to ruin the surprise.

Sherlock: Does she even realize…?

Hermione: I think so, but she's pretending she doesn't.

Sherlock: Why?

Hermione: Because she's pretending she's over you. Obviously.

Sherlock: Whatever. As long as she still gives me all the good spare parts.

Hermione: I sincerely doubt he wants her for her morgue access.

Sherlock: His loss.

…

 **[So this is the first chapter where I have major inconsistencies compared to Sherlock canon. Specifically, the fact that I've so far largely written Sherlock's parents as separated (or with his father dead), and unaware of the fake suicide; tweaking the fall rather changes all the canon characters' roles in it, especially Molly's; and assuming that the code Moran uses to activate the bomb (051113) is, in fact, the date, Sherlock should have been off hunting terrorists for 2.5 years, not 1.5 (oops). I may fix these eventually, or I may not (depending on how lazy I feel about re-posting slightly edited chapters) but I am aware of the issues.]**


End file.
